Transcript

Ep 2 Andrea Amati.

Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicle. A podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history

Welcome back to Cremona, city of industry and war like inhabitants. In the last episode about Andrea Amati, we looked at the city and its population top heavy with artisans. and a booming textile industry. We also saw Andrea Amati growing up in a world disrupted by war, but also uplifted with the artists, thinkers, and musicians of the Renaissance.

When Andrea Amati was in his 30s, the city of Cremona becomes part of the Spanish Empire, heralding in a more peaceful, or at least less deadly, age for the people of Lombardy.  But as people were taking a short break from invading northern Italy, the printing presses were ramping up. And an altogether new revolution was about to take place.

The Spanish monarchy took over from the Sforza in 1535 and would retain power that would last for the next 200 years or thereabouts.  This same period of Spanish occupation would coincide with a golden period of violin making in Cremona and would englobe the lives of the four next generations of our Amati family.

And so it was into this bubble of peace and prosperity that the now married Andrea Amati welcomed his first son into the world. They called their son Antonio Amati and as time went on, and with the help of all that new Spanish silver, Italians would invest their money in art and beautiful objects of every kind, including instruments.

These would be handed down in women's dowries or inherited by family members.

Today, where we might invest in property, in a peaceful, non war ridden country, and economy, it seems a sure bet, but if you lived in a town that was regularly trampled by the passing armies,  it may be more prudent to spend your money on mobile objects.

Among the artisans, and artists, who profited by this spending were the instrument makers, and Andrea Amati was one of those.

Andrea Amati was good at what he did, and thanks to the savings he had been making over the years, was almost ready to head out and set up his own workshop. But what was it like for a violin maker living in Spanish Lombardy?  The Spanish presence was fairly light. The pre-existing magistrates were mostly maintained, as was the process of electing them.

There was a Castilian, appointed by the king, with a handful of men.  The council around which the city politics revolved had about 150 members, and they would meet in the ancient town hall.  It was a mixture of local and, at the top end, Spanish representatives, and was responsible for public order, supplies, the budget, customs duties, and heritage.

They had a sort of parliament where for two or three times a month, topics were addressed and debates and voting took place.  It was one guy's job to provide arguments contrary to every proposal put forward.

I spoke to Dr. John Gagne about how the city of Cremona functioned under Spanish rule.

Yes, so, in a nutshell, the entire duchy of Milan is ruled by, well, a governor. In the Spanish period, there's a Spanish governor who sits in Milan and basically rules the entire duchy. The body that works for the governor is the Senate. Which is appointed for life, mostly elite men, 15 20 men.

Are they Cremonese?

No, they're all Milanese or they're actually, they're representative of the Duchy. So the Milanese Senate is, you know, often aristocrats from around the duchy in some cases some Spaniards, but it's mostly Italians.

Oh, yeah, so you're talking about Milan

Oh, yeah, which I'm setting up the so that's the kind of state right but then at the local level you've got two main administrators there's the Podesta Which is a magistrate that's existed since the middle ages and that was kind of often a foreigner, even in the middle ages, from another city, even if he's Italian, brought in to be an impartial overlooker to judicial matters. So in other words, there was so much tumult in the middle ages that they wanted their chief magistrate to be. Not from the city, so that he wouldn't be partial.

In the Spanish period, the Podestà is selected by the Senate in Milan.  And so it could be a local Italian. It could be, you know, as they've done for centuries, someone from nearby. Who would be the, let's say, chief magistrate of the city. So that's number one. And then number two is a castellan, who is the sort of castle keeper of the city.

And the castellan is an appointee personally by the king.  And that's basically a military man who is essentially acting as governor in the city, who runs the, all the other aspects that are not judicial. Let's say they're, you know, administrative, military, to oversee the city. So, often the Castellan or the Podestá has a sort of group of advisors who work under him.

It's basically, let's say, a two pole system.  Speaking for, in terms of religion a bishop who will oversee the spiritual matters. The interesting thing about Cremona is that there is no bishop resident for almost a century, from the mid 15th century to the mid 16th century. And part of the effort of the Catholic Reformation in the mid 16th century was to make sure that Cremona had a bishop in place because as we discussed earlier, Cremona was a hotbed of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas.

So those are the sort of the three people who would be chief overseers of the city would be the castellan, the protesta, and then the bishop. But then they had a sort of a council of elected members as well. There was a city council they're often appointed ministers with certain portfolios and that would, yeah, so they, and that would be, that would report to the senate of Milan.

So you've got, let's say, a diffuse organizational system that runs the city that represents different interests. In terms of who wants to control what aspects of city's functioning. Mm-Hmm. So with the, the hotbed of Protestantism.

Yeah. Why do you think that? Cremona was one of the biggest it was the city with one of the biggest Protestant populations.

A very, in the statistics it had about 50% artisans.  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a big aspect to it. I mean, you, you might think maybe the university town would be a great place for Protestantism to erupt because Lutheranism and Calvinism were religions of text. They were about a return to biblical scripture and therefore the literate tends to go for Protestantism first.

But yes, because Cremona was if not a university town, it was the hub of business aside from the metropole of  Milan. There's a lot of traffic of people, there's a lot of money, and there are lots of artisans who are making things, whether it's, you know, sort of merchants who oversee textile production, or often, you know, even music instrument makers.

Those are people who succeed in the business by being literate. So I think the theory is that basically it's a city with a high amount of connection to the outside world through motion traffic, and it also is predisposed to textual influence because of its literate population. And therefore, it becomes a kind of breeding ground for Protestant activity.

And, as I mentioned before, there's also no titular bishop who lives in the city for the first half of the 16th century, which is exactly the time when Protestantism is on the rise. That's frankly not uncommon around a lot of European cities that, you know, the bishop lives elsewhere and receives revenue from a town, but this may have been part of the reason why there was no one there to, let's say, squash initial growth of heterodox views, was because, yeah, he was living elsewhere.

The year after Andrea Amati’s first son Antonio Amati was born, 1537,  Andrea Amati opened his own workshop,  and a year after that, the family moved again into a house in the parish of San Fristino,  an area well known for its artisans.

Andrea Amati was now known as a master maker in the artisan class, and the new home he found for his family and workshop was on a small block consisting of a shop facing the street.  Towards the back of the building was a small courtyard with a well in the paved centre to collect water, and down a few stone steps beyond the well was a cellar.

Above the shop were comfortable rooms for the family to live in, and it was into this house that Andrea Amati moved his family.  Over the next 200 years, here would live his children, his grandchildren, and his great grandchildren. The Amatis parish had always been a place filled with artisans and artists.

Amongst their neighbours were famed woodcarvers, sculptors, painters and architects.  These people were a mostly educated literate class. Cremona, being proud of its tradition of schools and, and let's not forget that this was the renaissance, Cremona was a well connected city and up to date with all things renaissance y.

One of the movements in the renaissance was humanism, and I asked Jean Gagné to explain what it was all about.

It comes from a slang term for the teachers of letters called Umanisti, who taught sort of humanist subjects like philosophy, literature, poetry and that was distinct from most of the teaching that was going on in the universities, which was much more classic medieval philosophy. And so the humanists were interested in these subjects I just described. Inside the Curriculum of humanism was moral education, philosophy, history, all the things that were designed to improve your, you know, humanity, essentially, to make you a self-reflective person, to make you, you know, in touch with moral and ethical issues. And so, humanist education ideally produced that kind of person, but it also then became a kind of working method, which was an attention to good quality classical sources because bad quality classical sources often have errors in them and therefore would teach you the wrong things.

So, one of the programs of humanism was to find  good quality texts from antiquity, the best kind you could, or to build them yourselves through various different copies that then you would sort of collate and address and in doing that process, hundreds of texts from antiquity were recovered. And the recovery of those hundreds of texts often opened up new doors to all kinds of so far unknown aspects of ancient culture, which included things like treatises on, you know, physical education or on food or on money or on all varieties of life that had sort of been left in the dust for several centuries.

So the method of humanism was this sort of, let's call it textual criticism method, but it also then produced a whole bunch of new areas of learning in a variety of disciplines that, you know, were, were emergent in the Renaissance.

And is that sort of the science's? came from that as well?

Yeah. Yes. So there were, obviously that regime of textual study goes back to all of the ancient scientists, Pythagoras and others, who whose texts became increasingly interesting to the people of the, 15 and 16th centurys.

 There were schools, of course there were schools run by parishes usually. And so that's where they got their first teachings.  But I'm sure that they went to some kind of elementary school.  They all knew how to use it. They were not illiterate. Later makers such as Guadagnini was illiterate.

Not social status necessarily, but cultural status. Many of Cremona's artisans were educated and literate, having attended school, and the Renaissance principles of construction and measuring would not have been out of their reach. And so they had this tool to be able to experiment with and develop the violin and its form.

Andrea Amati was now established with his young family. The wars that had so disrupted their lives appeared to have resolved themselves. But was this just the calm before the storm?  Conversations and gossip among the artisans were in full swing. Dangerous ideas were spreading through the city. A movement that was quite sensational and that would have had a direct impact on the work artisans were commissioned to undertake was taking place, and care would have to be taken not to get themselves into trouble.

Accusation of heresy was a serious thing in the Spanish governed Cremona, so when the Reformation came to town, a lot of Andrea Amati’s artisan friends and neighbours would have been walking on eggshells.  It is difficult to emphasize just how far reaching the Reformation was and the sheer number of people it would have affected.

As the people of Cremona were finally coming out of years of war, they were now faced with a spiritual revolution that was challenging one of the most powerful structures in their culture and questioning not only how they lived their lives, but who had authority over their spiritual beings and immortal souls and this is important because in the world of the Amati family, life, religion, and the church were very much intertwined. Music and art were heavily influenced by religious structures, and for an artisan, one of their main clients, livelihoods, and sources of income came from the Roman Catholic Church. 

So what exactly was the Reformation, and why does it matter?

And how would it have affected Andrea Amati and the lives of his family? 

My name is Peter Jensen.  I'm a minister in the Anglican Church here in Sydney.  I've been a principal of a college and a bishop, but my study, which I did at Oxford, was on the Reformation in England. And I'm interested in lots of things, of course, not just the Reformation, but I have I teach what's called Christian Doctrine. I'm a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University. 

So I asked Peter Jensen to briefly tell us what the Reformation was about.

Yes. The Reformation is a a huge movement, which in some ways created the modern world.  It was  like all movements, it was sometime coming, you could see it coming. But there was a crucial moment in 1517, when a German monk by the name of Martin Luther,  who was an expert of the reading of the Bible,  became convinced by observing what the church was doing in those days.

And saying in those days that the church had got the Bible wrong.  And so he put up on a church door, which is one way of communicating in those days, something called the 95 Theses.  And these were his opinions about what the church should believe as opposed to what it did believe. And that really sparked this thing called the Protestant Reformation. The big thing was the Bible.  Was the church really teaching what the Bible said? That was really important. It was to do with how one gets to be saved.  Was the church really teaching the right way for people to be saved?  And Martin Luther and the other Protestants said no. And then so there was the Bible and there was salvation.

And then, of course, was the Church right to have the Pope as its head? Is that true to the Bible?  And there are a whole range of other issues which arose. The more they thought about it, the more they were saying no.  The church has got the Bible wrong and we have to reform the church, a reformation.  Or if the church won't have us, we will have to leave the church. And basically that's what happened right across Europe.

So here's how things were set up in Cremona from a religious point of view. During Andrea Amati’s lifetime, there was a bishop appointed by the Pope. He was the bishop of a number of cities and so did not live in Cremona. He controlled the diocese through a vicar who lived in the bishop's palace and his job was to deal with important things such as rent revenue, supervision of tenants, and finally, if he really had to, pastoral care.

The vicar spent a lot of time trying to keep the bishop's palace to himself, not letting other high ranking members of the church move in.  His duties were to make sure the books were being kept well, the relics were being preserved, the oils used and incense were in stock. He kept an eye on the church's income and that the births, deaths and marriages registries were being kept.

We can thank the vicar for this because historians are able to use a lot of information about our violin makers from these registries.  Finally, his job was to look after the souls of his parish. He had to record the number of inhabitants.  And the possible presence of heretics and concubines, or unconfessed. How he went about doing this, I'm not quite sure, but he also had to handle complaints.  So in effect, he was doing stock, inventories, and was the complete human resources department all rolled into one.  Some complaints to come his way were things such as; There was a priest in one of the parishes, in Bordolano for example, a certain Don Alessandro “He does not wear the clerical habit and plays dice”.  In another, the complaints are that the priest is ignorant and illiterate. In another, the priest was living with a woman and they had four children, and so on and so forth.  The bishop in all this was a distant figure, and it was a source of constant complaints from the Cremonese who thought they deserved an in house papal rep of their own.  The organisation of the priests in the parishes was a bit sloppy, and they themselves felt they were not being supported. Faith in the system was wearing thin. So when Luther's ideas and thinking arrived in Lombardy, most likely merchants coming from the north, many people in Cremona embraced them and from there, the city had one of the largest Protestant populations in Northern Italy.  I spoke to John Gagne about the connection between the Protestant and artisanal classes in Europe during the Reformation. 

A large Protestant population were the artisanal class as well. That's definitely, I mean, Lyon is a huge city for the growth of Protestantism and What do we have in Lyon? We've got a huge printing industry, a lot of manual merchants who are making all kinds of goods. Obviously the printing industry is a major pusher of Protestantism because it’s a business that deals with text. There is a big printing industry in Cremona too, which is also not irrelevant. For instance, Cremona was also the first place where The first Italian pamphlet against Luther was printed. So as much as it was a hotbed, it was also a site where they could print responses to Lutheran ideas.

And in the cathedral, sort of  in the main  nave, the dome on the inside, there's this painting and on the painting you have, you have Jesus sitting on his throne in heaven with a book and on one side you have, I think it's on his right, you've got the Pope and the Roman Catholic  bishop and on his left is a Jew and a Lutheran the're going to hell and that's on this, this huge, like in the cathedral  in Cremona. Yeah. Well, you know, it tells us something about the points of view that are, you know, most in people's minds when that painting was made. Yeah. And so they probably wouldn't have needed to do that if they didn't have such a strong Protestant population to  sort of say this to.

No, it's true. I mean, it's actually quite unusual to see Lutherans depicted in Catholic art in Italy in the 16th century. It's kind of, yeah, it's rare. So yes, you're right. I mean, the fact that they exist means that they were, you know, on people's minds,  for sure.

It's not very subtle.

No, but you know 16th century Catholicism is on one hand, you know, highly refined and very subtle, but also in terms of popular teaching, quite clear that, you know, either you believe orthodoxy or, you know, it's, it's, you're damned.

So this is why Europe of the 16th and 17th century are so tumultuous. I mean, they're, Europe is fighting, would fight 150 years or more over a political settlement for the fracture of Catholicism  that came in 1517. And  it took, you know, generations in which people needed to work through the  social challenges of more than one kind of Christianity in Europe.

So, you know it's sort of tragic to think of the way in which Europe broke down according to this irresolvable problem of religion because it really did take centuries. It led to a diaspora in the 17th and 18th centuries. You know, it was a story of decay and, you know, in terms of an imagined prior unity of Catholicism.

Yeah, I feel like you had this well for Cremona, for example, you had all these wars, and that just as they're coming out of all this war and into a sort of peaceful era of under the Spanish rule, then they have this war of like it was like a revolution really, because it's one aspect of Christianity trying to overthrow  the other, because the Catholic Church had a lot of power and the Lutheran ideas are kind of taking away all that power.  So you had this big war of ideas after the physical wars

Yes and maybe the other thing to say about that is that, you know, all the monarchs of Europe had nicknames. And the French monarch was known as the most Christian king. And the Spanish was known as the Catholic Majesty and the Spaniards were particularly, as they grew in power over the 16th century, they saw themselves as the defenders of the Catholic faith in Europe and abroad. Maybe that's one of the other aspects of what you're describing is that the Spanish were the Catholic hardliners in Europe. They really saw themselves as holding the line against the potential dissolution of Catholicism in the continent.

And so that's another aspect of the tensions in Cremona is that not only does a Bishop finally return to, to Cremona in the 1550s,  and this would be largely thanks to the impulse of reformists in Milan, who were keen to make sure that Rome.  sending bishops back to Cremona, but also the secular overseers of the city of Cremona were representatives of, you know the Catholic majesties.

And so they wanted to make sure that resistance to Catholicism would be quashed. So I think, you know, that you can understand the sort of social tensions that would have existed in that environment where it wasn't just, let's say, Italians dealing with Italians, it was Spaniards who were real orthodox Catholics making sure that the city of Cremona would follow Rome.

In 1545, Andrea Amati is in his early 40s. He has a well established workshop and family. Hints and influences of the Reformation were showing in town. A priest was questioned because he was reading from an Italian translation of the Bible and not a Latin one. In the streets of Cremona, where the people were talking in town squares, there was a great fear amongst the religious institutions as the Lutheran tendencies of the priests were anti clerical and had a clearly anti institutional attitude.

People were clearly unhappy about how the shop was being run. The Protestant numbers in Cremona were on the rise, and this was representative of many parts of northern Italy. And so the church had to respond in some way. 

Peter Jensen. 

In those days, the mass was the chief service of the church was in Latin so that people didn't really understand,  the ordinary person,  mainly illiterate,  didn't really understand church, it was all rather mysterious. There were also many statues, of Jesus, and of the Virgin Mary.  There were prayers to the saint.  There was a whole system where if you had sinned, you went to the priest and confessed your sin, and you may also pray to the saints.

It was a very different setup, if I can put it like that. But the church really was really central to the lives of people. The Reformation, of course swept through Europe. In some places protestantism became the dominant religion, as in Scotland, as in England. In other places, it became very strong but didn't become dominant, as in France, for example. In Germany, it became very strong as well. And so nations were divided. Very often, the question as to whether a nation would be Protestant or not depended upon the ruling family, the king or the queen.  So in England, the Protestant Reformation really became successful. in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who was a Protestant queen.

It had been there before, but it became really successful then.  So two things were happening. First, there was the spread of the Reformation amongst scholars, amongst ordinary people,  and that was made possible particularly by printing. The printed book became a wonderful thing in the, what was it, the 1460s,  if I remember correctly and by the time you got to the 16th century, the Reformation, it meant that many more people were reading, illiteracy had begun to decline, but also books were being written in the language of the people, not just in Latin, for example, so that people were reading. So it just depended which part of Europe you were in as to what happened.

So there were people in Italy who became Protestant but it didn't have as big an effect on Italy. As it did say on England, where the king and the queen went that way, or in France even.  Where it looked at one stage as though Protestantism would really become the dominant religion, but then the king changed.

People are grumbling about their absent bishop. There is also tension between the church, the local ruling class, and the city council. Add to this the threat of Protestantism. There was a form of moral instability and disunity within the city. Compounding this all were cases of heresy. There are documents in which priests complain about having to deal with so many prisoners and heretics, it feels like a burden upon them, that they are weak and an ununited city because of it.

There is an interesting interaction between local priest and a shoemaker in the town square in which the shoemaker, Giuseppe is making a comment about the extravagant cost of building the cathedral. After having asked the parishioners for money to do so, the priest is telling him to stick to shoemaking and leave the affairs of the church to those who are in the clergy.

At this point, another priest, the shoemaker's friend, joins the argument. Stating that we're all priests and should have a say in the matter, revealing his Lutheran ideologies.  This was quite dangerous, and he ended up being thrown into prison.

By the 1540s, it's perfectly obvious that there's a major revolution going on all around Europe.  And obviously the Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church becomes very, very anxious about this. And so in what is the date? I think it's  1547, I think it is. Begins a council that lasts all 1563, on and off. Not the whole time, you'll be glad to hear. In Trent, which I think is northern  Italy, isn't it? At any rate, and that's the place where it was held, and it was held, in a sense, sporadically. But the whole point of the Council of Trent was to, to look again at the Church's teachings, at practices, to reform them where they needed to be reformed.

And music came into that, so the Council of Trent also had a view on music. And I think both it and the Protestant Reformation thought music had become too complicated.  During the Renaissance period, more and more people were playing music. This was partly due to the advent of the printing press making music more widely available, and at the same time, instruments were evolving.

Music was a more popular form of entertainment in wealthy circles, and indeed on a popular level, folk music had always had a place. But here I will be concentrating on sacred music. that for many musicians and composers who wanted to make something of themselves would have to have concentrated on.  And yet during a seven year period from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent would start a change in this circumstance and sacred music would start to lose its dominance as secular music started its ascent.

Two areas of music were addressed during the Council of Trent. Firstly, music should promote a greater sense of worship in the congregation. Practically, this meant that they should cut back on polyphony, the layering of voices.  At that time, religious music was predominantly vocal and in Latin. The use of polyphony, the multi layering of voices, created a beautiful yet almost impossible to understand text.

So the Council of Trent stipulated that the music must be easily understandable. People would at least know what they were singing. This was more or less successful, depending on composers and provinces. Two great composers of the time were Josquin Des Prez and Palestrina.  Secondly was performance.  It was decided that only the organ would be used in accompanying voices or playing solos, and that virtuoso or theatrical, vocal or instrumental displays were prohibited.

So leading up to the Reformation and the Council of Trent, sacred composition used a lot of polyphony, the layering of voices. Here is an example of a work by Josquin des Prez, pre Reformation, first published in 1505.

And now a work by Palestrina, another mass written in 1562, after the Council of Trent.

So there you go.  Personally, I can't understand either, but that second one obviously got a tick from the Council of Trent.  And finally, a motet by Thomas Tallis written in 1570. So this is also post Council of Trent. It's a 40 part Renaissance motet for eight choirs of five voices each. So who knows what was going on in the it has to be understandable department.

In any case, I think it's just so beautiful no one really cared.

These three excerpts are performed by the very talented Tallis scholars. You can look them up if you want to hear the rest of the pieces.

The Council of Trent then lays the foundation. It's not medieval Catholicism. It's the cleaning up of a house of medieval Catholicism. It's modern, modern in the sense of, it's just modern in its day and it sets out Catholic teaching and has become a standard of Catholic teaching right down to the 20th century and of course it’s Roman Catholic thinking, it still stands, but other things have happened since then. So one of the teachings, for example, is that you can't have assurance of salvation.

In Protestant theology, when properly understood, because there’s nothing we bring,  we are simply relying on the cross of Christ as our salvation and our faith in the cross of Christ.  You may have assurance, but you're not depending on yourself, you're depending on the Lord.  In Catholic teaching, while yes, the cross is important, while yes, God's grace is important, it nonetheless is an element of your own good works.

You're not justified once and for all, you're justified over a period through your life. And therefore, rightly, the Council of Trent, rightly from their point of view says, You can't have assurance, because you can't yet be sure that you have enough  for salvation and of course they have the doctrine of purgatory,  going to purgatory after you die.

Whereas the Protestants said, no, there's no such thing as purgatory, it's never mentioned in the Bible, and once you've been saved by the Lord Jesus, through his death for you on the cross, you are saved.  Your sins have been washed away, you don't need to purge them in purgatory.  They're a big difference.

The Council of Churches is very intellectually important, by the way. Never underestimate the intellectual and, if you like, the spiritual power of a Catholic church. We must respect that.  And I would say for the next 100, 150 years, you are in a period of counter reformation.  We're in a period of counter reformation where the church is making some big changes.

We could ask the question, was Andrea Amati a Protestant? I think no. As we will see in future episodes, the Amati family would have several commissions from staunchly Catholic royal courts. And I don't think that the family would have lasted very long in Cremona if they had been of the Lutheran persuasion.

As much of its Protestant population left for Geneva.  But in 1549, Cremona finally gets a local bishop from a Cremonese family. He would be a fellow citizen linked to this city and would understand the sensitive needs and interests of the people. By the time the new bishop arrived, there were Lutheran heretics, the dodgy priests, dubious convent inhabitants, and all these evils were put down to the fact that they didn't have a resident bishop.

So with him came new decrees for the clergy. They were things such as, and including, but not limited to,  1. The clergy must wear ecclesiastical habit. 2. They must carry no weapons.  3. Does not keep mistresses at home or the children he has with them. 4. Does not swear. 5. Does not go to taverns. 6. Does not go dancing or play cards or dice. 7. Does not exercise worldly professions. 8. Recites the divine office regularly. And 9. If ordered, celebrates Holy Mass. 

Cremona had become the centre of Lombard Lutherism. There was even a reformed church now set up in Cremona.  To deal with this, the Roman Catholic Church ordered severe sentences, exiled Lutherans, and even sentenced them to death.

So there were quite a few Protestants, and then what would happen is they would often with the head of Inquisition.  And so often they would leave and go to Geneva. So there was a big Cremonese population in Geneva. And there was one Cremonese noble and he left and a few years later he was tried and he had his, all his property and assets seized, and then he was burnt at the stake in absentia. 

Yeah. So, I mean, the way that often worked, I mean, in terms of, I suppose the first thing to say is that there were distinct secular and, and religious judicial systems. So if you were, although they became a little messy, you know, when often what happened was. If you were a heretic, you would be tried by the church tribunal, and then if they were, you were found guilty, the church would hand you over to the secular authorities for punishment. So because the church didn't want to be responsible for killing people, that was often the sort of pathway in which people were punished was a religious trial and then a secular execution.

But yes, often people, let's say, were Not around for their execution. And so, but the point could still be made by burning them in effigy or something like that, which was to show that even though you may be lacking, let's say, the physical substance of the person, their place in your society was essentially being rejected. You know, that they were being extinguished from society, even if it meant, you know, burning them in straw or something like that. Yeah, so this often happened that you could be punished. Even when you weren't there by finding some representation of you and destroying it.  Like, they would do the same for kings.

Like, the whole symbolism of being able to  do something to a person through an effigy. Like, the power of that for them. Yeah, I mean, the most famous case is the French kings who Well, this happened in England too.  Often for funerals. The body was armed, but then an effigy would be paraded for a sort of serious Festival funeral and the effigy would be treated as you would treat the monarch. I mean they would be often they'd be given food or they might be put on you know up on a throne and the idea was to let's say separate the living tissue of the dead monarch from the idea of the monarch as a sovereign. So the effigy actually acted in place as they sort of universal and never ending life of the king or queen.

Whereas the body of every king and queen comes and goes, the idea of monarchy lives on and that's what the effigy would help to sustain is the idea of the of rulership not dying. And that's probably, you know, in reverse what's happening with punishments of heretics and absentia is that your you know, the flesh is kind of irrelevant.

What you're doing is making a point about their eternal being. Being extinguished from society. Which, which, like, from a Catholic point of view would have been quite severe. They're like, we've got what we've done.

But if they'd become Protestant anyway, they probably didn't care. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's They didn't hold to the, yeah.

Yes, I mean, yeah, it's true. If you don't believe in the, in the religious system, then maybe it doesn't matter as much, but it's still, let's say it's, it's a serious move in any culture to expunge someone. Yeah, I would like to be expunged.

The way different areas implemented these reforms differed, and we can see in Cremona that the cathedral still had musicians playing. But now, given these constraints and the tendency to be accused of heresy, secular music started doing its own thing.  There were noble courts around where exactly this type of musical ability was nurtured, but something bigger was happening, and as we will see, ballet and opera were about to literally burst onto the scene.

We saw in this episode how the Reformation would have disrupted Andrea Amati's life. Church music would start to change and the influence of the Renaissance will nudge music into new art forms that we will encounter in upcoming episodes.  The good news for Andrea Amati is that a powerful royal court is about to make an order from our Cremonese artisan and these instruments he is about to make will become the stuff of legends and much speculation.

This brings us to the end of this episode. I would like to thank my guests, Dr. Peter Jensen, Dr. John Gagne, and Carlo Chiesa. 

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Transcript

Ep 3. Andrea Amati.

After the demigod Hercules had accomplished his eleventh labour, giving himself a five-finger discount to Zeus golden apples, he stopped to rest on the banks of the Po River.  In those times, however, the area was overridden with thieving giants who plundered the small villages in the surrounding countryside.

Learning of the hero's mini break in the area, the elders of the villages approached Hercules and implored him to help rid them of the giants.  When they said help, they really meant, you know, if he could do it.  Ever ready for a bout of fisticuffs, in no time at all, our demigod was able to kill all the offending giants and free the region from their reign of terror.

The overjoyed inhabitants wanted to reward Hercules by giving him their most precious possessions. However, Hercules decided that what these people needed was a place where they could protect themselves in case new brigands arrived.  He couldn't stick around, he had heroing to do.  So he founded a fortified city and gave it the name of his mother, El Camino, which later turned into Cremona, meaning mighty. And this is the Renaissance take on why the city is called Cremona.

Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history

In the previous episodes of the Violin Chronicles, we saw Andrea Amati setting up his workshop, the life of the city, how it was run, and the movement of humanism, its effects on education, and finally the reformation, the influence the church had on people's lives, especially those of the artisan class.

Andrea Amati's workshop had been up and running for about 10 years when news came that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, would be visiting the city in August.  It was all anyone could talk about. They were going to erect a triumphal arch, there would be celebrations, feasting, and of course, music. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the ruler.

The excitement was palpable.  Andrea Amati, his wife, and their son, the little five year old Antonio Amati, would have been in the crowd that came out to catch a glimpse of the emperor passing through Cremona.  But now Andrea is fulfilling a royal order. The violin is having a coming-of-age moment and starting to be fashionable to the point that the trend setting French royal court is making orders for Cremonese violins.

And so it begins. What violin maker out there is unfamiliar with the phrase I'm looking for a cremonese instrument.  Join me as we look at the fashionistas who set the ball rolling.

Every city wants to look their best if the Holy Roman Emperor passes through. They were still working on containing heretics, and questions still abounded on how the church would approach things such as music.  Groups of thinkers or academies were popping up all over Renaissance Italy and ideas about the nature of music, its purpose and power were being discussed.

So I was, there was sort of like scientific things happening, right? You had Galileo and everything. And, and my, my thought processes, the music, I felt like they.  There were like music texts where they say, you know, it's, it kind of moves your soul. It has this physical impact. And I was thinking, it's not so strange that they would approach music in the scientific way, but in the same way as like, Oh, well, you've got gravity, you've got the stars and music.

We can feel, we can actually physically feel something when we hear music. So we may as well treat it almost like a science. It's, they're doing all these sciences, like why not music? And it's overlapped into the religious sphere as well because it had to do with your, your soul and  your inner being sort of thing.

I'm John Gagné. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the university of Sydney and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries. So I suppose the first thing to say about that is that the ancients had a strong mathematical sense of music. You know, Pythagoras's theory was that, you know, you remember that the parable of the reeds and you cut reeds to a certain length and they make a certain tone if you blow through the top of the reed and I think the mathematical, I forget the mathematical, formula, but it's sort of like the length of a, of a string is inversely proportional to the sound that it makes. And so that was established in antiquity, but became increasingly of interest. I mean, people had known about that for centuries through the Middle Ages, but you know, with the advancement of certain techniques, interest returns to let's say the mathematical qualities of music.

There was a huge tradition to draw upon. I mean, one of the examples is something like St. Augustine, who was writing in late antiquity, who wrote a treatise on mathematics, but it was all about music. So they were always kind of intertwined. Maybe the best case study to think about is the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who lived around the same time as Galileo, slightly earlier, and was very interested in this Pythagorean theory of music and arithmetic, he was one of the proponents of the idea of the music of the spheres.  Which has an interesting core idea, which is that if we think of proportion of distance, it can be the string of an instrument, but it could also be the distance between two planets, or three planets, or four planets. And so the idea was that we could, if we could imagine reeds and strings having a relationship of mathematical sound to you know, within the mathematical system, then why could we not also imagine the distance between the planets having the same kind of relationship, and that was an elaboration of a pre-existing idea that the spheres, that there were spheres in which all of the planets of the galaxy moved, and that they produced, therefore, a sound, which was not, let's say, a real sound, but resonated with your soul. So that the music of the universe was a kind of naturally God established harmony in which proportion, mathematical proportions from the minuscule to the galactic made sense and resonated with the natural proportions of, you know, our soul.

And that's universal harmony?

Yep, and then of course, then as you said, it becomes kind of it becomes a cultural trope. People begin to play with the idea of the music of the spheres. It becomes a poetic inspiration in the 16th and 17th centuries when poets begin to use the idea of the universal harmony, the music of the spheres to write poetry about, you know, concord in general between humans, between God and man, between you know, all living beings. And so it was a very powerful idea, which I think it remains a powerful idea to think that there's something rational and proportional in the universe and that it works on, let's say, scale of sizes from the, the minuscule to the, to the most enormous.  And so when you see like those Renaissance.

because the violin is drawn in a very sort of Renaissance mathematical type way, would they have been sort of inspired by that idea of, is that, was that all  one big thing?

Definitely in terms of the mathematics, I think, you know, that's part of the, you know, when you go back to the 15th century and you look at some of the most successful artists of that period, you know, just in terms of religious art most of them, I'm thinking here of artists like the 15th century artist Piero della Francesca, Or Leonardo da Vinci who was a contemporary.

They all leave sketchbooks where, you know, they've got measurements of man down to the, you know, we all know the, so-called the Trivian Man of Leonardo, which is the man with his arms outstretched his legs wide and using a circle in a square. But artists had much more complex methods. Showing the proportionality of the human body about, you know, let's say the size of the, the hand to the height of a man, or you know, the span of arms to the height.

So this is basically a workshop method for most art working artists was to understand proportionality of the body, which would then could be broadcast into other media. So, for instance, what made a building pleasurable to be inside? was the fact that it corresponded to a natural portion of the human body.

And so you would build buildings in, you know scales that were scaled up or down from the size of a human. You know, it's either, it's like 15 men high or something like that.  So I imagine that probably when it comes to the design, the increasing complexity of the design of violins, this, there's something similar at work there, which is that artists and mathematicians already know how to think proportionally and to work out in sort of grids. I think that's the best proportion for whatever they're constructing, whether it be a building or an instrument. And I think that's probably what we see in development over the course of the 16th and 17th century, is the kind of mathematical perfection of an instrument according to those rules of proportion.

Yeah.  Okay. Thanks. Thanks for the universal harmony thing.  I was wondering about that.

Andrea Amati is now working in a time of counter reformation in Cremona. We spoke about this in the last episode. And although church music was predominantly vocal, there was also the organ and a few musicians. When voices were lacking, they would begin to replace a voice with a viola, and the strings would often double or replace a vocal part accompanying the mass.

These musicians would also work for the local council, playing music for outdoor processions, where louder wind or brass instruments would be needed to carry the tune. I spoke to Peter Jensen about the 16th century attitude to music and the differing views reformers and churches had to musical expression.

And so yeah, it's interesting that this is the time they were living in and what they would have  seen and done was directly a result of this  counter reformation. Indeed, it was the intellectual and spiritual world in which people were living. And they're working for musicians who, who are playing in the church and composers at the time, they would compose and they would write and they were saying, “According to the Council of Trent”, I have written this composition.

Ah, well how interesting.

So they would quote it just to be like, because at the same time, around then, there was a little bit of an inquisition going on, so you wanted to be Yes. It was actually quite risky to be an artist or a musician in that world because you could easily be accused of heresy. I'm sure.

Now, amongst the reformers Luther was, he loved music. He thought that if you're going to be in the ministry, you will need to be a musician as well. Or you know, you need to love music. And he wrote these hymns and so forth and so on. Other people in the, of the reformers took slightly different views. A man called Zwingli in Switzerland was I believe a good musician, but he wasn't in favour of music in church.

He thought it would be too sensuous, you needed to hear the word of God. And having music in church was a bit like having statues in church. That was visual, the other was aural. But that was not the majority view. The majority view by the great John Calvin, for example, the Frenchman in Geneva, the majority view was that we needed music in church, and in particular,  They looked at the Bible and they saw the book of Psalms was there.

So, they were particularly interested in the Psalms and in some places,

Sorry, can I just say, Psalms are actually songs. There's actually musical directions.

Exactly. Yes. It's in the Bible.  What they did was, they would in some places have the Psalms just as they were written in the vernacular language.

In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, for example, the Psalms are set for the day. They change depending which Sunday it is. There are also some songs sung by the Virgin Mary, for example,  called the Magnificat, and other songs in the, in the prayer book. And you would either say them or sing them.

Well, you can, people get really passionate about music, and in that era, in the Renaissance, when You've noticed, have you?

Yes! Well, in the, in the Renaissance, they were kind of, they were  They were talking about, you had the science and the spheres and there was this one, there was this idea that, that music was so powerful and it moves your soul and because people, they, everyone knows you're moved by music and they're saying if this thing that can move our souls and our souls,  our eternal souls are in danger if we do it wrong.

Yes. And then, and you can see why they were really a little bit worried about it. There was hesitation as well as.

That's right.

And today I feel like we'll go, oh, music, yeah, it's good for you and this, but there, they were like, it is so, it's such this this force that can really, has a power to, to send you to hell.

For good or for bad. It could be demonic.

So, I mean, and that's why in church, I think.  Church music was such a thing that was spoken about and debated about and can we do this or not because you're, you're, you're killing people if you're doing it wrong or you're saving them if you do it right.

And some would say don't do it at all but most said yes let's do it.

Oh yeah to be on the safe side.  Zwingli. And he actually went around destroying instruments.

Did he?

Yeah. So,  burning things. 

He was, he was a little bit strong.  He was a good man in many ways, but he had his.

He had his Had his moments.

Had his moments. It was a tough one.  Yeah, it certainly caused conflict.

Yeah, well, I was reading different documents and a lot of it was often like a kid you didn't really know what to do with.  You send them to a monastery or there was one of the Amatis. They're living in this house and there's all these kids and the 16 year old he's a priest You know, and he's still living at home and I was like that's an interesting dynamic and then some of them you read accounts of things like complaints and things and You see their ages, and they're like, they're teenagers.

Yes. And they've just been sent to these monasteries, and they're bored. 

Yes. Bearing in mind that people didn't live as long in any case, so a 16 year old

Except these guys. Well, some of them did, of course.

But one of the things the Reformation did convents and so forth, it changed the attitude, I believe it changed the attitude to work. An ordinary person's work was just as important as People in the monastery and so forth and so on.

Now, the Italian wars that we spoke about in the first episode of The Violent Chronicles were ending, and Italy was entering into a period of prosperity and economic boom. Cremona has a population of 36,000 people. There are 40 music and dance teachers and one instrument maker on the.  And this, my friends, was our star Andrea Amati.

Cremona had made its mark as a musical centre of the region.  Andrea Amati was receiving important commissions, and in 1566  a new choir master was appointed to the cathedral. His name was Marc Antonio Ingegneri.  This was good news for the Amatis, as not only was the new choir master a composer, he was also a violinist, and this could only be good for business. What's more, he was talking about creating a group of musicians in the church, a type of orchestra.  Amongst his students was a young man called Claudio Monteverdi. We shall get to him soon.

Around 1560, the ten year old Girolamo Amati, Andrea Amati’s second son, after coming back from school, would have helped in the workshop where his father and older brother were busy. Ever since the exciting news of the Royal Order for Charles IX, King of France, this order would also have been a sign to any inquiring inquisitors that the Amati Family were above suspicion of heresy as this order was destined for the very Catholic court of France.

John Dilworth is a violin maker, restorer, and prolific writer and researcher. He's been a regular contributor to the Strad magazine and published numerous papers about instruments and violin makers, contributing to many specialized books on the subject. He's been a teacher, lecturer and judge in competitions. And now he'll tell us his thoughts on Andrea Amati.  John Dilworth tells us about Andrea Amati's working style and the interesting fact of labelling and dating his instruments, something we don't think too much about these days, but was in fact a novel move on his part.

In Cremona, right from the get go, Andrea Amati was always very careful to  sign and date his labels. So we know where we are with those. And it's very significant, I think, that in Cremona He was very conscious. He was making for austerity, really, you know, when you even when you look at paintings and other Artifacts from the time it wasn't common to put the date on you. You would sign, you know, I Michelangelo made this or whatever, you know, but you don't often get a date. But it's I think it's significant that in Cremona they well Andrea Amati to begin with did, and he was getting  commissions from, well the most notable thing, from the court of Charles the Ninth in, in France. So it was clear he was, he was already famous.  So he was getting from, you know, the most powerful court in Europe at the time. He was being asked to make a celebratory set of instruments.  So he was, He was clearly aware of his position and prominence and his skill. So he signed it and dated it and all his successors in Cremona, because he is the fountainhead of all the Cremonese tradition.

It's his sons and his grandson, his great grandson who right at the heart of everything and everyone  who subsequently worked in Cremona learnt directly or indirectly from them. Girolamo Amati would no doubt wonder about the young king of France who was the same age as himself as he helped out with this impressive order for instruments being constructed for a boy king.  They had to make 12 large sized violins, 12 small sized violins, six violas, and eight Bass violins or cellos.  But that wasn't all, they had detailed instructions on how the instruments were to be decorated with the royal coat of arms, symbols of the king, justice and the house of valour.

These instruments would become known as the Charles IX instruments and are perhaps the most well known work of Andrea Amati.  The painted instruments of Andrea Amati have been the stuff of legends over the years and there has been much speculation over the images and who the instruments were really made for.

But what we do know for certain is that the artworks on the instruments were by Cremonese artists, and that the town had an established school of painting and produced many fine craftsmen in this domain.

John Dilworth Extrapolates.  A big question about the Andrea Amati Instruments that the, the ones that were made for Charles the ninth. that have all this decorative painting on the, on the backs, um,  and all sorts of people have tried to point, make a case that this was, these paintings were made by Leonardo or something, you know, something ridiculous. My feeling is that he did get a local painter to do that. I did quite a lot of research into that showing pictures of. The back and close ups and everything around museums and galleries and they said, oh this, yes, this fits in perfectly with the, the Cremonese school of painting, which I didn't really know was such a thing, but there were every town in Italy seems to have had a  school of painting and they bandy around a few names that I'd never heard of before, but you know, are known to experts.

So there is that, that you can, I can well imagine that Andrea Amati got the thing finished and then went to a chap next door who happened to have the local Artist, you know, and said, I want St Catherine on the back of this violin and he paints it in and goes back to Amati's workshop to be varnished over.

It is also probable that Catherine de Medici, the king's mother, also had a hand in obtaining this set of instruments.  The Cremonese were immensely proud of the skill of their painters and indeed had a thriving community of artists. So that when Andrea Amati and his sons were making this set of instruments for Charles IX, there would have been little doubt that they would call upon one of the many talented local painters to decorate the instruments.

And so, knowing Catherine's taste of all things luxurious, violins were ordered from Cremona.

I spoke to Dr. Susan Broomhall about Catherine, who is more or less supposed to be the person responsible for ordering this large set of instruments from the Amati family.  The existence of these violins would have played a role in a far larger story of what was going on in the Valois court, and were not simply musical instruments, but statements, in part, and amongst many other objects, describing who these people were and what they wanted others to think of them.

My name is Susan Broomhall, and I'm the Director of the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I'm a historian by training and I work on women and gender ideologies and assumptions in the early modern period in Europe.

Yes. So Catherine is, a very unusual individual because she spends almost all her life in the spotlight, in the centre of political intrigue in Europe.  She spends most of her, her life in France, where she is both the queen of France and in the French context, to be the queen is always to be a consort of a king. There's no option to be queen in your own right, the ruler in your own right, then she's the mother of three successive kings who are her sons, which is quite a remarkable innings, I guess, of somebody in the public eye where she spent most of her life from. Early teen years, right through until she dies, and very much influential at the French court.

Because of her name, Catherine de Medici, most people will  link her to the Medici family in Italy. They are of course very prominent in Florence, and she is indeed part of that family. But her mother was French, so very often people think of her as an Italian. She is part Italian and also partly French. That's quite important because when she went to France often people would see her as a foreigner. Most of the people who are critical of her and most of the propaganda about her tags her as, as a foreigner. But in fact, her, her mother was French.  That said, she grew up in Florence and in Rome, and I think she always carried with her the imprint of Italian design, Italian culture, the way that the Italian courts at that time in the early Renaissance were using fashion and art. For political purpose, she carried a lot of those ideas with her to France. And I think she very often looked back to Italy as a source of inspiration for artistic plans. 

And do you, sorry, do you think that’s from her, her upbringing that she had this love of the arts and it's, yeah, is that about how she was brought up?

I think it's very much part of the style of the Italian Renaissance courts at this time. That People understood then in a way that perhaps we don't always connect together now, that cultural, cultural forms were forms of politics that you told messages about your political situation, about your context, about your identity and certainly propaganda.

You did that through cultural means. That's how you showed prestige. So I think it's a normal kind of process for those courts at the time to think of arts as a way to demonstrate power. So that, that kind of connection is one I think we might have lost as we think about power now. We think of it in a kind of parliamentary setting.

For, for the leaders of that period, culture is power. And so this kind of artistic display, and I mean artistic in the broader sense of architecture, music, arts was always a demonstration of power and a way that you told stories about yourself. And of course, the stories that you want to have represented about yourself. And they're often the stories that have lasted. That's how we understand a lot of what we do about the Renaissance is looking to the buildings and the art to try to make sense of these people and what they were trying to put across politically. 

Yeah. So like today, would that be like?  The Prime Minister just having,  just going somewhere and getting, having a commission of a giant painting.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's hard to translate into today because we have forms where, let's say in the Australian environment, or even actually in the British or the American environment, When, when somebody is elected to high power, they move into a house that represents that high power.

So that there's often a kind of residence that you move to that that's very different to the sort of environment of the Renaissance where you build your own personal manor house to demonstrate your power. And so each of the different. Dynasties that are vying for power in the Renaissance are each building their own magnificent mansion. Perhaps Trump is a better example of that kind of way of thinking, of the cultural politics of say Mar a Lago, is more akin to the Renaissance style than say  say 10 Downing Street or, you know, Kirribilli House in Australia, which, which, it goes with the person.

Trump is a Renaissance man.  Yes, Extravagance.  Never heard of him described like that.

Yes. Well I think he thinks through the cultural politics of power in that way. He's got an eye for the visuals and, and for the kind of cultural forms in which you can convey it. And so he, and, and, and I guess actually he is a very good example of somebody who communicates through cultural media.

So maybe those media have changed and now we think about social media, but his messaging is very visual. It's very, it's very simple. And that is. That is not dissimilar to these Renaissance princes who have emblems that they plaster on every building so you know immediately the minute you see the Medici balls, okay, it's a Medici house, or you see somebody's kind of symbol and you know exactly who it belongs to in a very Like the Trump Tower. Exactly. So I don't think this is unusual, yeah, I don't think this is unusual to Catherine, it's exactly the model of the time. What is unusual for Catherine is that most of the elite women are never in a position to have access to the purse strings, to make the story about them. And to some extent, although Catherine is never the person directly in power, she has a lot of influence. She's able to control funding, to put forward political messages. They're not exclusively about her, they're very often about her dynasty, about her sons, but nonetheless, she's one of a fairly small number of women who are able to create political stories from that era.

In the mid-16th century, Catherine de Medici and her son, the king, went on a grand tour of France.  The purpose of this tour was to strengthen the bond between the French court and the various regions of the kingdom.  It would also demonstrate the power and wealth of the monarchy.  During the tour, Catherine and Charles visited many cities and towns all over France, including Lyon, Tours, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille. They were welcomed with great fanfare everywhere they went, with parades, feasts and other public events organized in their honour. Cities would be decorated with elaborate arches and other adornments symbolizing the monarchy.  The streets lined with cheering crowd.  In the larger cities such as Lyon, Catherine and Charles were greeted by the city's mayor and other dignitaries. They were treated to a series of festivities including jousting tournaments. Musical performances and banquets. The Grand Tour was also an opportunity for Catherine and Charles to meet with local officials, nobles and other influential people and to hear their concerns and grievances. This helped Catherine to better understand the needs of the various regions of France to govern the kingdom more effectively.

It was during this tour that the Royal Court also went to Bayonne, where the Queen Mother would see her daughter, who had married the King of Spain, Philip II.

Hi, yeah, I'm Dr. Emily Brasher. I'm an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, in the School of Design. I'm a fashion and costume historian and costume designer, but I also play viola, so I've definitely got an interest in the intersection of performance costume and theatrical costume.

The queen mother Catherine de Medici and took her thirteen year old son on a tour de France, basically to say, look, look at us, we're your royal family. And in doing so, she did it in an extravagant way and they were called the magnificences, I think, which she would.  Do, and the, some of the symbols for the royal family that they would use, we can see on the this set of instruments that are called the Charles the Ninth instruments that Andrea Amati made.

What we do know is that she was like going all out. With these court festivals at the time to  really impress people and it was also like, people are saying, you know, it's to impress everyone with their wealth and divert attention to the fact that there was like this civil war between Catholics and Protestants that, you know, ended up with this really brutal St Bartholomew Day's Massacre in was it 1572,  I think?

Yeah, another royal wedding. Yeah, 1572, the marriage of Margaret Valois to Henry of Navarre. So what she's also doing though, is really cementing her son's legitimacy to be the king.  You know, it's like, she's trotting him round, basically, and it's like, nah, this is your king. This is what we're going on and you know, using this, this spectacle to do it.

And she goes all out with it as evinced by these incredible instruments, you know, these Amati instruments. And when she finally gets to Spain she put on huge spectacles as well and her daughter had married King Philip II. So she's really cementing alliances with the Catholic world as well.

Because we've got the English Protestants, of course, at the time, you know, stirring things up that the Dutch are Protestant. So she's kind of trying to use spectacle to, you know, establish this legitimacy of Catholicism across Europe in this band across Europe that also I think perhaps they're Catholic as well, and sort of across Italy and Spain and this band, so that's really important.

But also French rule as well, versus these other Catholic empires, so she's really solidifying that.

I spoke to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, author. 

The first instruments that survive are for the French court, so Catherine de Medici  seems to have ordered them for Charles IX of France, and we were talking.  Privately about the Valois Tapestries, which the amazing tapestries in the Vatican, which celebrate how great Catherine de Medici and Charles IX was.

But, you know, it's a political smokescreen. It's an absolute disaster, but they put all their money into showing how wonderful they are. And we see that there's these incredible There's this, there's this incredible sort of set campaign trail around, around France, rather like Trump.  If I'm allowed to say that.

Doing  It's like  Trump meets the Tour de France.

I think so. I mean, you know, going to different cities, having their rallies, showing how great they are. Showing off with these incredible festivals of culture, where they, and at every single one, they take something from Ovid's Metamorphosis and they create, they recreate it on a huge theatrical scale. And this is actually before the ballet, it's before the opera, it's before orchestral music as we think of it, and you've got a band of maybe 12 Amati violins providing the music for things which are so dramatic that in one case  They put  some of the musicians in an artificial dolphin and sail the artificial dolphin around a flooded  artificial lake in order to in, in order to, and you know, that just gives you the epic, epic size of, of these happenings.

And, and at the same time, you've got the.  The Spanish representative trying to talk politics and war and, and you've got Catherine going, look at that scantily clad nymph on a, on a shell coming by on a dolphin. 

It's I mean, it's, everything is about distraction.

I mean, I think it's amazing because in the background, you've got the, you've got the, the wars of religion in France on one level. And then you've got this other level of these amazing festivities that Catherine's putting on with their court, which are all about harmony  and, and getting along with each other and justice and  how amazing the, the royal family are.

It's, it's absolutely amazing. I mean, at one, at one level, it seems to be the prototype for a Trump campaign rally. On the other. This is the thing which then leads to, yeah, out of this comes the skills of the dancers, which by the 1580s becomes ballet.  Out of this comes the idea of orchestral music. Out of this directly comes the English court mask, which is sort of a reduced, a reduced set of players. We actually know this dolphin and artificial thing.

When Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester in. 1572 wants to impress Queen Elizabeth. There's sort of a will he won't he marry her kind of thing, and to sort of his penance is to put something on and it's a smaller version of what happens at Bayonne. So it's a smaller dolphin.

Ah, he whips out the dolphin.

He whips out the dolphin, yeah. And, and does that at  Kenilworth Castle with an artificial lake and all of that. And then we see from that the English court masquerade. So, you know, ballet, opera, Monteverde's Orfeo is exactly. One of these again. And, you know, everything comes back to this thing. And the prototype of the Trump rally.

Yeah, but where, where's his dolphin?

I think that's, that's what'll prevent him from becoming president again.

It was during this tour that the Royal Court also went to Bayonne, where the Queen Mother would see her daughter, who had married the King of Spain, Philip II.  You have the Charles IX instruments that are painted by Andrea Amati, but there's also a one that's decorated for the King Philip of Spain. One of the ideas is that these are for Philip II of Spain, in which case the likely time is during the time of Elisabeth de Valois.

If so, they are probably earlier because the need for them has got more to do with Elizabeth de Valois marriage than  anything else.  Now the fly in the ointment is that when we look at all the violins which went to France, which have got the French paintings on them, now we've  we actually happened to know from engravings that the performance position of these, of these musicians was really shoulder to shoulder and  at some point, I think someone must have dropped one of them.  And the, whoever the luthier was, sometime around the 1580s or something like that. Decided that what they needed to do was take the corners off and sand them down.  And if you look at any of the Andrea Amati’s that are painted, you see these really worn down, sanded down corners. Not just shortened, but rounded off, so that they're almost sort of like a chisel edge where they meet the rim. And we see those on the Philip II of Spain ones as well.  So that suggests that the same Luthier had the same way with these after they were made. And we don't see them on ones which we don't think ever went to it to France.

So the other possibility with the Philip the second. It’s actually that these may have, in order for the great festivity at Bayonne, which is the, the peace between, it's, it's designed to celebrate the peace between France  and Spain. It's actually the only time that poor Elizabeth got to see her mother again, and Philip II threw a hissy fit and refused to go and sent his wife as an emissary because he felt it was a bit of a,  you know, he'd been suckered into a piece that he didn't want.  But everything there's about harmony. And a lot, when you look at a lot of the other things that happen at Bayon, it's, it's about the, the, the union between Mars and Venus, which is the creation of harmony and you know, all of these things through, mythology.

So the idea that the band, the music is made half of Spanish,  half of French, representative instruments.  Would actually, you know, that would be so central to what, to what the festivity of Bayonne is, that I rather suspect that these things were entirely created by the French for a propaganda of harmony.

So they're saying, we're so,  we're so close that, look, we're playing on instruments that, that are representing the Spanish court because we're just  in such harmony with that country. 

And actually, one, the one instrument, the one Andrea Amati, which for years was unrecognized in the Musée in Paris.  Is a, is a chopped down viola from the Philip, the second set.

So whilst all the other ones are spread around the world, the one, the one French Andrea Amati is a, it's a Spanish one,  which, which is. Evidence of nothing and evidence of everything at the same time.

Why are we talking about this trip to Bayonne? What does it have to do with the Amati family?  Well, things are heating up in France. There is a civil war happening between the Catholics and the Protestants. The instruments the Andrea Amati has made to deliver to the French court have messages on them indicating where their loyalties lie.

Catherine would have undoubtedly realized the precarious position of being in power and good relations with the Spanish was a must. They were an immense superpower at the time.  Her daughter was the wife of the King of Spain. That was a good start. But her son was still dangerously young and factions at court would always be at work trying to take power.

Besides the Charles IX instruments, The Amati workshop also produced similar instruments with the Spanish royal insignias. Were these commissions from the Habsburgs, or were they used as a political message ordered by someone else completely?  There are several ideas surrounding this second set of decorated instruments.

Firstly, they were ordered by the Spanish court, perhaps to celebrate the wedding of Elisabeth de Valois, Catherine de Medici's daughter, to King Philip of Spain. The second hypothesis is that they were ordered by the French court to demonstrate the strong relationship between the two countries, and the extent of the harmony that existed between them.  Look, we're playing on instruments with your coat of arms on them, we have to be friends.  These are just two of many ideas surrounding the set of instruments bearing the same name.

Spanish heraldic symbols.  France is literally in between the Protestant northern countries and the Catholic southern countries of Europe.  The French royal family were walking on a tightrope of diplomacy. There were both very powerful Catholics and Protestants at the French court as the violins fiddled away.

In the next episode, we will see how Catherine de Medici handles this situation and the repercussions the tensions in France will have on all of Europe and inevitably reaching Cremona and the Amati family.

I would like to thank my lovely guests, Dr. John Gagne, Dr. Peter Jensen, John Dilworth, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, and Benjamin Hebert.  You can leave a comment and follow the podcast at the violin chronicles dot bean doc.  I have an Instagram and even an email at the at the violin chronicles@gmail.com.

You're listening to a live recording of Timo Vico of the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing on an Amati Brothers cello.  Thank you so much for listening and I hope to catch you next time.

Transcript

Ep 4. Andrea Amati.

During the Middle Ages, Cremona was under the dominion of the Holy Roman Empire.  At that time, the people of the city were forced to pay an oppressive tax of three kilograms of gold every year to the emperor, which for convenience was melted into a sphere.  One day, fed up with paying this tax, the people of Cremona decided it was time to break away from imperial rule. And so the Mayor Giovanni Baldessio was challenged by the Emperor King Henry IV to a duel in order to settle the tax dispute.  Mayor Baldessio was able to knock the king from his horse, thus sparing Cremona from its annual three kilogram golden ball tax, which was instead issued to the Mayor's fiancee for her dowry.  Back in the city, Giovanni began to be called Zaden de la Bala by all, and he married Berta de Zori, a beautiful girl of noble origins, who brought him many landed properties as a dowry and a big ball of gold. In another version, which is probably more plausible for a civil servant, is that the duel that took place between Cremona's mayor and the emperor was not a sparring match, but a tournament of bowls, or bocce, and Giovanni came out the victor.  In memory of that heroic enterprise, an arm with a ball in hand was added to the city coat of arms with the inscription meaning “my strength is in the arm”.

And this is why the Cremonese coat of arms has a hand holding a ball of gold.

Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie in Mirecourt.  As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.

So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship. Determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.

Welcome back to Cremona, a city you can find in Northern Italy on one of the bends of the impressively long Po River.  Bursting with artisans and commerce in the mid-1500s, we return to our story of instrument maker Andrea Amati and his workshop.

Andrea Amati was not a lone artisan in this city, he was surrounded by merchants and trades people, busy in industry. There were belt makers, embroiderers, blacksmiths, carpenters, boat builders, masons, terracotta artisans, weavers, textile merchants, and printers. Just to name a few of the 400 trades listed in the city at this period.

I speak to Benjamin Hebbert, Oxford based expert, dealer, and author about Andrea Amati's making methods. 

It's really difficult to know. I mean, so Andrea Amati, you've spoken about Brescia before and, what I imagine your listeners will have heard of is that Gasparo Da Salo is very much the established figure in Brescia.

Before, they're kind of the same age, but Gasparo Da Salo actually comes out of a tradition which goes back centuries, and Andrea Amati turns up out of absolutely nowhere, and it's Andrea Amati who makes the violin as we know it. It's the thing that we're familiar with, it's the, it's a design which repeats itself throughout his family in Stradivari. Even to the point, there's a, there's a really interesting observation that although the Brescians were making viols and citterns and all sorts of things beforehand, when it comes to the violinists, the violins that survived, they're all copies in one way or another of what they were observing from Cremona.

So this late starter, Andrea Amati, actually seems to be the starting point, even for Brescian violins, even though they come from a longer tradition.

By this time, Andrea Amati had perfected the outline of the modern-day violin. He and his eldest son, Antonio Amati, were working on patterns and jigs to make the instruments for a royal order for the King of France. The order was for 12 large sized violins, 12 small sized violins, 6 violas, and 8 bassoons. Bass, violins, or cellos.

Each instrument was to be decorated with specific symbols and motifs, representing the royal house and portraying an image of how they wanted to be perceived.  When Andrea Amati received the commission for these instruments, things were really starting to kick off at the French court. Civil war was brewing and no amount of entertainments by Catherine, the Queen Regent, was going to put out this particular flame.

In the Kingdom of France, a great conflict arose between two groups of people. The Catholics and the Huguenots, the French Protestants.  This conflict became known as the French Wars of Religion. It all started when the Huguenots, who included not only peasants and the artisan class, but nobles as well,  demanded more religious freedom and equal treatment under the law.  This did not sit well with the Catholic majority, who saw the Protestants belief as a threat to their own faith.  As tensions rose, violence erupted in the form of sporadic attacks on Huguenot communities by Catholic mobs. The French monarchy, looking to maintain control, attempted to suppress the Huguenots by force.  However, the Huguenots, under the leadership of figures such as Admiral Gaspar de Colligny, organized and fought back. Several wars broke out, with battles being fought across the country. The conflict raged on for over 30 years, causing immense destruction and loss of life.

The French court was filled to the brim with intrigue and power struggles.  Tensions between the Catholic majority and the Huguenot minority was only increasing.  At the centre of it all was the French royal family, trying to maintain control over a divided country. The king and queen, surrounded by their advisors and courtiers, were grappling with finding a solution to this conflict. Meanwhile, in the shadows, whispers of conspiracy and betrayal echoed through the halls. Allies became enemies, and trust was a rare commodity.  The court was full of ambitious individuals, each seeking to advance their own interests and increase their power.  One day, rumours spread of a Huguenot plot to assassinate the king. The court was thrown into a frenzy, with spies and informers working overtime. It was a dangerous time to be a Huguenot at the French court, and even the slightest suspicion could lead to an arrest or execution.

The Amati instruments destined for the French royal court were part of this much bigger story that was unfolding and would involve many of the contemporary superpowers of the day.  Not only did the royal house have to navigate internal court intrigues, there were also the neighbours, Europe’s other powerhouses, all looking to France in its weakened state. Like vultures contemplating a wooden wildebeest on the Serengeti.

To understand where Andrea Amati’s instruments were headed, we will first take a look at the woman who may possibly have been responsible for ordering them in the first place.  Catherine de Medici, the original Black Widow.  I spoke to Susan Brimhall about this fascinating woman.  I know we've already spoken about her, but we're gonna talk about her again.

I got the feeling, sort of looking at Catherine, that she arrives in France and the king that, the prince that, what, was he a prince when she married him? He wasn't king. Yeah, he's a duke. Yeah.  So she, she marries him, and I feel like from the Duke, he was a little bit nonplussed about it. And then, she loses her dowry at some point. Is that right?

Well, so there's a bit of a story here that, um. The Medici house, when she is a, is a girl, a young girl, is ducal. So they're a set of dukes.  And when she marries into the French royal family, she's marrying very much up into a royal family. So a ducal house is moving up the ranks to have a marriage with a royal house, and the reason that, I mean, normally a royal house will be looking for other royal houses to keep the bloodline at the royal level, if you like. But in this case, the French have been at war, uh, they've been at war trying to claim pieces of Italy which has exposed them to a whole lot of culture in Italy that they bring back to France, and that's an important part of this story. But they've also bankrupted much of the state. And so the French king, at the time, Francois I, he’s also looking for something to fill the coffers. And the Medici family is very, very wealthy at this time. It always creates a kind of a black mark on Catherine that she's never really quite of the bloodline. They didn't have children for a very long time. After a time, well, they basically used the money that Catherine had brought to the marriage, but her marriage negotiations had been made by the Pope, who had since died, and you know, the money the French expected wasn't quite forthcoming, let's say.  I'm not sure it ever quite pans out the way the contract said. They were going to be, but in this case it certainly didn't. So, you know, black mark that she comes from a ducal family, not a royal family. Black mark that it's kind of new mercantile money rather than any kind of old money from an impoverished house, let's say and then further black mark that the money isn't actually being delivered as expected, at least by the French. And then fourth black mark, she's not delivering children. So for a whole lot of reasons, things look pretty bleak for Catherine very early on in that marriage. 

So Catherine, she doesn't have much going for her, and would I be correct in thinking that she sort of uses the arts to endear people to her?

So most of Catherine's known artistic patronage is in the second half of her life. But we do know that from the time she married, most sort of, most royal marriages, people adopt a kind of an emblem or a symbol. Sometimes it will be a bit like a motto, and sometimes it will have a visual component part. And when Catherine marries, she adopts Iris, which is, um, a bringer of, she's a bringer of peace in mythology and her symbol is the rainbow. And so on early, some early structures where Catherine has an opportunity to impose herself, if you like, in the design, we see some small elements where she uses the rainbow symbol as a sign of her as somebody who's bringing peace and prosperity to France,  but really mostly when her sons are in power, because as I said earlier, three of her sons become king and they all become king relatively young and her second son, Charles the Ninth, I think he's about 10 when he, when he arrives on the throne. She is, more or less the regent for him for the first three or four years of his reign and at that time she really has a great deal of power. I don't think we should ever think that Catherine, her motivations might be to, to explain a version of herself that makes sense to the public in certain contexts. But they're also always about her children and about the dynasty that she's married into and about the longevity of that dynasty and the work that they've done for France. So that dynasty is called the Valois. The Valois family are the family that she's married into and much more than she's ever celebrating the Medici, that doesn't really make sense in France. What she's doing is celebrating the dynasty that she's married into and the future that her children represent for that dynasty in France.

Back in the Amati workshop, the instruments would have been made in a series so that they would all be identical. And this would also make the whole process faster. A few extra hands would have to be hired to help out with such a large order if they were to get them all finished on time, but they could definitely achieve this.

Violin maker, expert, author and researcher in Milan, Carlo Chiesa.

It is also worth noting that the Amatis at that point, they were wealthy enough people. This is very important because, uh, it means they, the kids had an education.  Uh, they were able to, go to school, uh, to be trained properly, not just in the workshop. And they were artisans of a high level anyway. So the daughters of Andrea Amati who got married, they usually got married with the people who were from the same social status and that is also worth noting, it means that they were not working for low class musicians, but usually their commission went to noblemen or high class customers which they were able to deal with.  That is also another of the reasons for the success of cremonese making, because the artisans were able to deal with the high-class customers. The greatness of the Amatis was that they, uh, set up a method for making instruments, which is basically the same as we do today with an internal mould and blocks glued to that mould. So that you can repeat time after time, the same outline. Bressian makers did not have the same. That is, I'm quite sure. 

This would not be the only time Andrea Amati would fulfill a royal order for the House of Valois.  A set of five instruments also decorated with Royal Insignia and with the motto. By this bulwark, religion stands, printed on the sides, had been delivered to the French monarchs, who were making a point about their religious conflicts, even on the instruments to be played at court. The French royal family felt the threat of the Protestants at court to the extent of having reminders in a somewhat passive aggressive form painted on the orchestra even.

So the whole idea of symbolism, do you think it was kind of stronger during that time? And I'm thinking of the, the Charles IX instruments in all the decorative paintings they have on that, because they're symbolic as well. Would they have had sort of a more profound meaning than like, we would go, Oh, isn't that nice? It's a painting. But for them, would they have seen it? 

I spoke to Dr. John Gagne, Senior Lecturer in History at Sydney University. 

Maybe the first thing to say is that this is, it's common for rulers to put their, uh, heraldic mottos on everything. Actually, I just read a PhD dissertation about, uh, the court of Ferrara and the banqueting apparatus at the court of Ferrara. And part of the theory was perhaps that  rulers feared that their own Employees would steal things and so they tended to mark everything with, you know, their, their, labels so that they wouldn't be stolen. That may just be actually kind of, uh, bad vibes against lower class people. But I think maybe more than that, it intends to extend the image of the ruler into as many places as possible. It's like a radiating sun. I mean, that, that is actually the metaphor that's often used for  pre modern rulers is that they're, they're like a star and that the rays of the star goes out in all directions and what better way to sort of send out your rays than actually physically to implant your, your motto or your heraldic crest on things that then travel around the world and represent you. So this seems to me to be exactly what's going on both in terms of banqueting plates, but also musical instruments, because they're probably actually not so different in value actually. Sort of fine plateware and musical instruments. They're things that would, were at the pleasure of the ruler and that were seen as belonging to him or her more broadly So with the so called Amati violins, you’ve got the sort of template seems to be the crest of the king in the centre, surrounded by two pillars, which are then flanked by two women, which are then flanked by two Ks.

The Ks are for Carolus, which is the Latin for Charles, which is Charles IX, the king of who supposedly commissioned these violins.  The figures are piety and justice, we think and then the pillars were very commonly used in the rule of Charles IX. It seems as though the most common mythological figure that Charles IX was associated with during his tour of France in the 1560s was Hercules.

And Hercules, you know, one of his labours was to sort of crack through this mountain.  The ruins of which left, you know, these two pillars, which became the sort of entrance to the Mediterranean or the exit into the Atlantic. So they're known as the Pillars of Hercules, uh, and they today, of course, separate, um, southern Spain from North Africa. And so I think the pillars may refer to the idea that the king is like a Hercules. He is this sort of, you know, even though he's a child, a teenager, he's an invincible king. Uh, and the crest in the centre sort of reminds you of who that Hercules is. It's Charles. Well, yeah, because Catherine, she had as her symbol, Isis? Iris? Iris or Isis? Um, the one and it was the rainbow. And she had the rainbow. Maybe it is Iris, you're right.  Yeah, Iris is the goddess of messengers. Iris, Isis is an even more ancient Egyptian goddess. The problem is Catherine is also associated with a number of classical figures, I mean as is Charles. Occasion determines what classical figure best represents the spirit you want to.

Yeah, so I think the rainbow thing was for harmony. We thought her peace and harmony vibes.  And I thought it was funny because, um, I think it's, is it Mary, Queen of Scots, the Scottish.  I don't know if it was her motto, but the Scottish one is a unicorn. And so they literally, there's like

rainbows and unicorns,  um,  yeah.

So she would be like harmony. And then I'm imagining that Catherine probably would have had a hand in the decision of,  we'll go with Hercules maybe, like, cause, to show the strength, the whole idea was trying to, wasn't it like, she was worried, she had a child king, it was,  uh, to have a weak political situation she needed to, like, bolster things up and make it stronger.

And, you know, I mean, uh, you know, obviously in 1559, Henry II dies dramatically in a terrible way. He is, gets basically splinters in the eye to kill him because they puncture his brain and, and all she has is basically children. I mean, they're not adults. Um, her first child, the second dies within a year. Charles the ninth is the second one to take over. But you know, he, he's in his teens. He dies before he is 25. Doesn't one of them die after playing tennis?  Like he played a game of tennis?  Well, that's probably Francois, actually. Caught a cold and died.

Yeah. It's like 1560 You just can't count on these kids dying after a game of tennis.

And 1560 is also the year when the first religious war breaks out in France. So that's the real, so this is Catherine's real challenge, is that, you know, she's a new widow. All she has is underage children. She's got a kingdom that's breaking apart in religious war, and her job is to bring it back together.

And so the, you know, the reason for this tour in 1564- 65 is to unify the kingdom. Rainbow style with by parading this, the new king, even though he's in his teens around the country so that he's able to, you know, make relationships basically with all the major cities.

But if he's Hercules, that's cool. Hercules was quite young, right? When he was doing all these things. So right. She's harmony. She's got Hercules.

Yes. The other thing too, that, I mean, there are some, we, you know, there's no, one of the interesting things about, um, monarchical symbolism is that they're often. Multivalent. They can be read in multi different ways, many different ways. And so, the pillar, the columns might mean Hercules. There's also, uh, a theory that they could refer to, um, the twins, Castor and Pollux from antiquity, who were sons of Leda. One was immortal and one was mortal. And it may be that that was a way of referring to her two children, the sort of children who are closest in age, uh, Charles and his, his brother, um, who became Henry III. That, you know, they're two strong brothers side by side, and so there's, there's force in unity, let's say. And that the column, you know, you can't hold up a building with one column, you need two columns. So there may have been, uh, further, uh, reinforcement of the idea of strength through the columns as well.

So both, it both invokes Hercules, but it also invokes, uh,  Stable. Stableness, basically. Yeah, and once again, um,

It's funny that they keep choosing figures from antiquity and not sort of, like, Biblical figures that they could possibly have done, but because  it's the Renaissance.

Yes, I mean, it's true. They often, both are in the mix. Um, and there are all kinds of, you know, most, if you went to, let's say, one of the entries at these, as the Charles IX entered a city, you'd see both. I mean, there would be religious music, there would be psalms that would be sung or spoken. But yes, it's leavened and intermixed with classical culture as well. And they were seen as mutually reinforcing, right? That often a classical king was a, let's say, a typology that meshed with a religious figure as well. So that was part of the deep layers of Renaissance culture was the overlapping of the classical and the biblical. So, just because you may invoke Hercules doesn't mean you can also not, um, invoke a religious figure who sort of resembles Hercules. Whether it's, you know, David and Goliath or something like that, you know. Uh, so there would be, let's say, layers as well. But you're right. The, the classical was the, was the, say, the cover of the book, let's say. Um, and it's so, and it was kind of around this time that, uh, the, the Charles IX instruments  are made.

So, so the idea is, yeah, it's around when she's doing that, they're doing that, the tour of France and there are these  decorated instruments,  but also, um,  there are other decorated instruments.  There's one  for  Marguerite de Valois,  and then Henry the fourth,  he has one  after all his problems,  and then he has an instrument, an Amati instrument that has, um,  Le roi de France par la grâce de Dieu, and you're like, you know, the king of France by  the grace of God, or  something to that effect, and you're like, well, yeah.

It was like, it wasn't easy for him to be, to remain king and not get killed.

When Catherine de Medici arrived at the French court at the age of 14, no one expected that one day she would be more or less ruling the country through her children.  When she was doing this, her main preoccupation was to ultimately keep the peace and promote the House of Valois, into which she had married. And when you're strapped for cash, war is never a good idea, economically speaking. The intrigue and plotting at court made it a precarious place to be. War was not good. Besides the fact that if you weren't careful you could easily get yourself topped off.  Conflict was dreadful for the economy. And the state of the royal coffers was definitely not good. But Catherine had a plan, and it was this.  Distract the nobles with spectacular events and they might be too preoccupied to kill each other. A key element to these events was music, music and theatre, where she would have Catholic and Protestant nobles at the court play act that they were living in harmony rather than scheming to kill one another. Which is what they were most probably doing, straight after coming home from one of Catherine's magnificences  where they would have been fighting side by side with their rivals, liberating a skimpily clad damsel from the clutches of a paper mache dragon on a lake in the castle grounds.

They had a lot of structure, structures in their, in their clothing.

Yeah, they did. They did.

So, um, what's happening, uh, something that came in the  1570s was the French Farthingale.

Dr. Emily Brayshaw is an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney School of Design.

And that kind of popped up around then and it's the new silhouette really. And this is women's fashion. And it's like a stuffed roll around the hips, known as a bum roll, and a hoop with horizontal stiffeners tied around the waist. And it made the skirt stick out from the body. And this is the French farthingale. So you can kind of think of it like a tabletop and then the fabric. Falling from the bottom. And this is kind of different from the, um, Spanish farthingales, which were more cone shapes. And what they're really doing is essentially hiding the body through tailoring and creating a completely new body, which we're seeing and, and different, different silhouettes. Italian dressing is kind of a lot softer and not as structured as like English or French or Spanish, which is very highly structured as well.

It sounds incredibly uncomfortable and heavy.

It was very heavy, but some of these devices like the farthingale are actually built to support the weight of these fabrics. Okay. As well.

It's like a whole, like a little building you're walking around with.

Yeah, yeah, you are. But, and then you've got sort of, um, heavily woven gold fabrics, velvet woven with gold. You've got your jewelry embroidered in over the top.  Um, this is, uh, Catherine de Medici here. She has like this bodice with just pearls and jewels. Lots of different parts coming together. Yeah, she has this like really delicate lace collar and then these pearls and jewels sort of making like a diamond shape on the corset.

And then these furry Yep, the big ermine fur sleeves. Pearl necklace. We've got the high forehead and pale skin that was very popular throughout Europe. Lots of pearls. Pearls were very, very expensive at the time and showed access to trading routes as well that she would have had. But also, um, all of these layers, we need to remember that it was actually really kind of cold.

Yeah. And these drafty big old castles were not, like, the heating was not great.  And so all of these layers would also keep you quite snug. Right.

But for Catherine, keeping those scheming courtiers occupied was a full time job. And one of her right hand men to help her with all this was a fellow Italian, of course, called Balthazar de Beau joyeaux.  He would help Catherine stage her productions. Keeping the nobility from their fiefdoms. So the queen mother could keep an eye on those volatile nobles and constantly bedazzling them at her, sorry, the King's court. Along with her entertainments, she also embarked on an extensive building program, enlarging the Louvre and landscaping its majestic gardens. She surrounded herself with painters, sculptors, astronomers, poets, architects, philosophers, and musicians.  The constant arranging of banquets and entertainments meant music was an integral part of life at court and its presence was everywhere. From intimate chamber music for the royal family, to banquets, and more lavish entertainments,  music accompanied everyday life, as it does in some ways today.  So, music, musicians, their instruments, and by extension, those who made them, were hugely important.  And a major component to her toolkit for success and or survival. If she had had an operations manual, it may have looked a bit like this. 1.  Try not to get self and children murdered by scheming factions at court. Music as a magical force on our souls and a harmony keeping element in the universe must be used. 2.  Distract above mentioned scheming factions by keeping them occupied with a packed program of activities and throw beautiful women in their paths that they will have liaisons with and extract any useful information via pillow talk back to the Queen Mother. Strategically placed lute players around the court could help with the atmosphere.  Now, this team of charming damoiselles Catherine used to glean information about any plots afoot were called her Flying Squadron, and for all intents and purposes, appeared to do the job, supplying the Queen with constant information and, at least on one occasion, uncovering an assassination attempt on the Royals. Number 3.  Hide the fact that the Royal coffers are empty.  Thanks to wars both abroad and now between the Catholics and the Huguenots at home, they had sucked the bank dry.  So the best solution here would be to carry on in an extravagant fashion as per usual so no other power can see their weakness. Music and merrymaking shall be had at all times. 4. Strengthen the royal house of Valois.  Show the world its greatness, order an orchestra of stringed instruments with beautiful painted decorations  so everyone can witness their place appointed by God on violins that hold a connection between this world and the divine. Keep in mind that music represented the harmony of the universe. And according to some Neoplatonic thinkers, possessed magical and therapeutic properties as it activated the benign influence of the planets and healed the body by reviving the soul. The thinkers of the Renaissance saw music as a medicine, an elixir for your being. The instruments as a powerful intermediary between the terrestrial, heavenly and super heavenly world.  Both the violin and the lute were tangible links to higher forces and were thought to have a magical, mystical effect on our spirit.  How important, then, is the luthier who makes these instruments that have such an effect on our immortal body and soul? The symbol of a broken lute string in paintings of the period represented a rupture of the heavenly harmony. Perhaps there was hushed silence lute player snapped one. I mean, today you're just peeved because let's face it, strings are expensive, but at least we don't have to worry about disrupting heavenly spheres every time we snap a chord.

Susan Broomhall.

So, when we look at those instruments that, you know, are typically clustered together called kind of the Charles IX set of instruments, they very clearly have markings on them that one would associate immediately with Charles IX. So, you know, we've been talking a little bit about a set of symbols that each royal individual has that kind of marks them out and separates them from some, somebody else, and usually they try to signal something about that person and what identity they want to bring and Charles the Ninth, I mean, his most simple symbol is a K for Carolus so that's just a Latin version of Charles it's usually a K with a crown on top. So if you see that symbol, that's usually a first you know, guess that this instrument is, or this thing, whatever it might be, because they're often on buildings as well. It will tell you that the building is made for him in his reign, something around that. So it's a good dating mechanism. So we see that immediately on a number of these instruments, but it's also combined with a number of other things that we associate with him.

So I said also, sometimes it's pictures, sometimes it's words, mottos. And on these instruments we're either seeing the words, um, in English, piety and justice. Those two words are often associated with Charles IX, not because he necessarily was wonderfully pious or just, but this was very much part of the identity of what kind of a king he was going to claim to be and it's often combined with, say, an image of a woman who represents justice, so she might have the scales in her hand, and there is one of the instruments in that collection. Well, I think she's been sliced in half now, but, you know, you can clearly see she's lost her scales, I think, and she's lost her stomach.

That one, that's really interesting. So off the top of my head, I can't remember which image it is, but the one that has been, It's a cello, yeah.  And so you can look at one and kind of take a pretty good stab at what was represented on some of the others. So some of them are a bit faded, but they mostly share a set of symbols that we would expect, so fleur de lis as a sign of France, the crown, the initial and the crown together, so the K for Charles. If that makes Latin, you know, for Charles. The columns with ribbons, garlands around them, the image of justice. But I mean, some of them also have the heraldic symbols of, um, his arms and the, the, the chain of St Michael's, which is the, you know, in England, um, One might hear about the Order of the Garter, which is a particular order that only a certain number of people, it's usually about 24, people are ever allowed in at any one moment, and it's a kind of sign of those who have, you know, most proximity and prestige near the king. France has the same thing with the Order of St Michael, and you can see the chain of St Michael on, um, surrounding a number of the heraldic arms symbol on some of those instruments. So, my understanding is one of the instruments looks like it may have a date of 1564 in Roman numerals.  And that would be completely consistent with obviously the timeline of Charles IX.

But for Catherine, she really does have a lot of money at her disposal in her later life, and so what she is doing is investing in whole palaces, whole garden complexes, and all the things that go with that. So, you know, all the interior artwork. Um, all the sculptures and these gardens that she's laying out, as well as the interior space of these palaces, often have very, very large rooms that are suitable for big performances. So indoors and outdoors performances that often involve performances of dance. They'll almost, you know, they'll certainly have musical components. They look a bit like theatre. They look a bit like ballet.  Sometimes they'll have horses, um, and so there's kind of like a staged horse equestrian performance in the middle of it. They can sometimes look like kind of mock jousting, mock battles. Sometimes they'll have mythological themes. It's a really kind of complex art form. So when you say performance, it's not quite theatre, it's a bit of everything. And perhaps, um, what's significant or particularly significant, apart from the fact they cost an awful lot of money. There's a strange combination where these things are being designed by people who work for Catherine, but they often involve the royal family and all the  courtiers actually performing in these things. So it's not like, uh, the royal court sits back in a theatre environment and watches something on a stage. The king and the queen will be dancing in the middle of the performance and they'll of course be in leading roles. Um, you know, so the whole structure of the performance is.  Also a kind of political, of course, it's political messaging, but they're right in the middle of it. Um, so it's perhaps quite unusual to think about. It's not just, oh, we're putting on a theatre piece, but these people are in the middle of it. And this is something very much associated with Catherine de Medici. So these things are, uh, you know, yes, they might be pretty and they're certainly extremely expensive, but by getting the courtiers to act in them, uh, she's also trying to kind of, I guess, model certain kinds of behaviour amongst them and to, and I think this is where music and dance are really important about establishing a kind of tone at the court, which is about harmony, always about harmony. Um, sure control by the royal family over the court here. So there's a bit of establishing of hierarchy, but it's always about trying to bring the French court together and find common interests against external enemies.

Oh, it's kind of like, um,  17th century team building. 

Indeed, indeed. Yeah, so she has three sons who become kings. The first one is Francois II, and he really only lasts about a year, um, and perhaps he's most famous for being married to Mary, Queen of Scots. Um, so then Francois II, then the king who follows him is Charles IX. He comes to the throne, I think he must be about 10 at the time he comes to the throne. Um, so he requires a regent, um, and Catherine. I should also add at this point, France is fracturing very clearly into two large factions of Protestants and Catholics would dominate, but Protestants are quite a powerful and politically  well set up force who have a great deal of power and because of the competing factions at court, I think in the end, a decision is made that, well, Catherine de Medici, she's his mother, she might be the best person to kind of protect him and steer him through  this really fractious moment. Because if you appointed anyone else, you know, they would represent one side or the other. But the assumption is, and again, this is a kind of emotional way of thinking, is that the mother only has his best interests at heart and therefore will, you know,  guide him down the middle of this. And then when he's about 13, he announces his majority, as it's called and then in 1564, she and Charles participate in what's called the Grand Tour of France. And for two years, they basically travel around the country, sort of saying, Hey, here's Charles, this is your king. 

On this infamous Tour de France, the court made its way south to Bayonne, where the Queen Consort would see for the first time after years, her teenage daughter, who had married the King of Spain Philip II.  Diplomatic talks would take place and everyone knowing that the young French king did not wield the power, it was his mother Catherine who had to be told by the Spanish that she was being far too lenient with the dangerous Protestants in her court and why hadn't she killed them all yet? 

So yeah, there are a series of perhaps Really famous extravaganza and, um, one of those, the one you're referring to happens when she, so her daughter, Elizabeth becomes the Queen of Spain. They spend a long time writing letters to each other and then she wants to meet her daughter again. So they arranged this meeting at the border between France and Spain and everybody cries when they catch up. It's, you know, all the eyewitness ambassadors talk about how everybody cried, including the king. And then one of his courtiers told him off that it wasn't appropriate for a king to cry. It's the first time they've seen each other since Elizabeth got married and went off to live in Spain. So they're kind of, it's a big catch up for the family, the Valois family, if you like.

So that's the king who cries at the ceremony? Okay. Not, not Philip.

No, not Philip. Philip doesn't attend. Um, there's some discussion about whether or not he should attend or whether, uh, Catherine might be too beguiling.  A series of these  magnificences or extravaganzas not only took place and were written about by ambassadors and then sometimes had printed accounts with some illustrations showing what happened at them, but they are also turned into a set of tapestries. And I wonder if that's why you picked it, because, you know, in this kind of. multimodal milking of the event, and I guess you may as well, if you spent lots and lots of money on it, get every possible use out of it. A series of the biggest kind of extravagances during her time in power, Catherine's time in power, are then translated into tapestries.

So they're displayed in their own right, right? So they're pieces of art, but they're art that's telling you about other art that Catherine has done, if that makes sense.

The Amati set of instruments may have travelled with them, being played by the court musicians to add an extra layer of bling to the affair. In any case, it would be unthinkable for the royals to set off without their musicians, and the Valois musicians would play on nothing but the best.

John Gagne

Yes, so this is maybe, of all the French kings who loved music, maybe Charles IX is not top of our list. We think of other kings from later periods. But there's been a lot of research done recently on King Charles IX, who, you know, died when he was 25, so he didn't have a lot of time to become a music lover, but it seems like he was really interested. A lot of  members of the court testified to his love of singing, the fact that he would, like his father, often leave his pew in church and go join the choir to sing. When a mass was being performed, both Tai and Dessus, so that's the lower voice and the higher voice, seem to be capable of both. And there are some drawings by Antoine Caron, who was one of the court artists, showing him seated at a table with a bunch of, with a score and surrounded by musicians. With all the instruments sitting in repose, the idea being that the focus here is on  Reading of the score and sort of, you know, musical literacy rather than, let's say, instrumental literacy. So this is about, you know, learning your notes and how to sing. But in addition, maybe three things to mention.

First is his foundation of an academy, l'Académie Royale de Musique which was quite early 16th century academy for the arts that he founded, including members of his, like, friends of his, like, Baille and Ronsard, poets, and then his composer servants, including Guillaume Cotelet, who was his organist, and left a number of published songs, both religious and secular that I listened to the other day, they're quite lovely.  And maybe most famous is, uh, Orlando di Lasso, uh, Italian composer who served the King of France, and who we have records of several letters being sent to him saying the King is basically willing to pay him anything for him to come into his service, to join him on his tour of France, to, uh, be there when he wants to, you know, wants his services. The letter, in fact, stipulates he'll be paid on sort of like three levels, like he'll get a base salary, he'll get a salary as the First composer of the King, and then he'll get a supplementary salary. So he was being loaded with cash. So it tells us something about even before he reached the age of 25 that Charles IX was, you know, soaking himself in a highly literate, musically literate environment, which makes the acquisition of Amati instruments more compelling, let's say, because he would have been looped into, through the composers probably, and some of the servants who  brought their musical skills from Italy to networks of knowledge where he might have been able to trace some of the finest Italian makers and really learn  he should have as a king of France to embellish his court.

The Amati set of instruments were sent to the French court and would provide entertainment for both the royal family and the nobles at court.  In the previous episodes, we saw how Catherine de Medici used spectacle and entertainment as a political message when she toured the French kingdom with her son. Back in the capital, she would do the same using court festivities as a means to this end.  At this point, you may notice that Charles IX is no more. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 23, and it is now his brother, King Henry III, Not to be confused with his brother in law, Henry, who was mixed up in the St Bartholomew Day's massacre, who would eventually become Henry IV.  Are you following? There are a lot of Henry's, it's really confusing.  In this episode, we have seen how the French wars of religion caused economic hardships for artisans and tradespeople as far away even as Cremona. These problems caused by the religious conflicts were the same that Gasparo Da Salo in Brescia was facing when he too had to borrow money just to make ends meet.

We also see how the painted instruments of Charles IX made sense in the French court, where symbolism and extravagance played a political role at court, and the messages the monarchy were trying to convey were printed on multiple platforms.  Charles IX is a music loving king in a court filled with theatre and drama.

Andrea Amati's instruments were accompanying the court intrigues, balls and spectacles with their musical accompaniments, used for both pleasure and strategic plays at court.  So here we have what is perhaps the oldest set of violins placed in their historical context. These violins would not be disposed after the Valois royal house stopped ruling, but would be used with others to entertain the court for many years to come.

I would like to thank my delightful guests, Dr. John Gagne, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Carlo Chiesa, and Benjamin Hebbert.  Thank you so much for listening to this episode. You can subscribe to the podcast at theviolinchronicles. podbean. com to know when new episodes are posted, and you can write a comment or question if you want there.

So join me as we wrap up the life of the Baroque master, Andrea Amati, and head towards some cool new designs by the brothers Amati amid a smattering of wars, invasions, pestilence, and disease thrown in.  Thank you so much for listening, and if you like what you hear and would be into supporting the podcast so I can make even more episodes, please sign up to Patreon.

Transcript

Ep 5. Andrea Amati.

It is said that many years ago, the king Agilulf destroyed the city of Cremona, and that for the longest time it remained a pile of ruins, destined to be forgotten with the memory of its people crumbling to dust.  But then one spring morning, a war weary Gaelic prince, encamped on the banks of the Po, with his army, near a pile of crumbling stone buildings. And it was there, as he was resting, that he saw an extraordinary sight.  A lion, but this was no ordinary lion. It was limping and appeared to be in pain, unable to walk on one of its paws. The gallant and fearless prince approached the animal, and the beast, upon remarking the prince, showed him his injured paw, cut and bleeding, with a thorn sticking out of the wound.

The young man, showing not an inkling of fear, removed the thorn and healed the lion's soft paw. Just imagine the prince's surprise when a few hours later, the lion reappeared with a deer in his jaws.  Padding forward, he offered his gift to the young man, laying his catch at the prince's feet as a gift.

The mysterious prince left with his army the very next morning, but as they were setting off, who should appear but the faithful lion, who would go on and follow him wherever he would go.  When they reached Rome, the prince realized that the ruined city where he had encamped and met his beloved lion was the city of Cremona.

And so, as he made his way once again through the countryside, he headed for the ruins of this city.  But tragically, on the way, his trusty lion died. And so, upon reaching the city, the Gaelic prince decided to rebuild Cremona.  Firstly, he buried the lion, and on that spot, he built an incredibly tall tower, called the Torazzo.

This is the bell tower of the cathedral in Cremona.  And on top of this tower, for a very long time, was a majestic bronze statue of a lion in the act of raising his paw towards the prince.  A few centuries after the lion was placed on the tower, the bronze animal was melted down and fashioned into a large bell that was placed in the tower.

And as the bell rings, the memory of the faithful lion lives on.  Today, there are at least 13 lions dotted along the facade of the baptistery, and more in front of the cathedral.  Perhaps one of these fierce felines was the prince's faithful friend. 

And this is the legend of the Lion of Cremona.

Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker.

In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Andrea Amati perfecting the outline of the modern day violin and the French court under King Charles IX, Catherine de Medici's heavy influence as regent on her young son, and the significance of the images painted on the instruments ordered for the king, who was indeed a music loving monarch. And finally, the Amatis working methods that led in part to their success as instrument makers. 

Almost five years after the royal tour, Andrea Amati is now 65. His place as a master instrument maker is undisputed. He has received orders from the King of France, no less.  His production would have been different to that of violin makers today, in that he would have had to have been more flexible, making different sized and shaped instruments of the Renaissance era. He would have simply been following the fashion and client demand of the time.

I talked to fashion historian Dr. Emily Brayshaw about what people would have looked like back then and what musicians in particular would have worn. 

So you've got farthingale sleeves on the men even, but and what it would do though is if you sort of look at these portraits of musicians and portraits of them playing instruments too, you can sort of get an idea of how they moved with that. So, you know, if you've got a massive ruff which is, you know, your 1580s fashion, you're not going to be sticking your instrument under your chin.

You know, there's too much ruff, there's too much lace, there's too much collar. So you might be holding it lower down, perhaps against your upper pecs.  If it's a violin you'll be like playing it gamba style on, your lap, you know, or if they're bigger, got variations of them resting on the floor, these kinds of things.

So yeah, it's definitely going to be influencing how you're playing your instruments too. And then, the elbows as well, to be able to move your elbows. That's always an issue.

It is an issue.

Yeah, absolutely. It is an issue. And if you can, you sort of see photos of like these big farthingale sleeves, these slashed sleeves you know, big puffed sleeves, these kinds of things. You're not going to be raising your arms too high above your head. And certainly there would be outfits that they required movement in, you know, like if you're going into battle, you want full mobility or you're training for fighting or these sorts of things. So what's interesting in a lot of these illustrations is they're very idealized bodies coming from the art conventions of the Renaissance that were looking to classical Greek and Roman statues.  And in portraits of the era, these shoulders are, we can see in these portraits, the neckline sits right down around the upper forearms particularly over the shoulder.  Dress. Yeah, here we've got this here in a Mary Princess Royal portrait and we've got like this really low down cut down and it would have been very very difficult to raise your arms and your elbow, elbows would have been set right down and we see this a lot in like the Peter Lely portraits.

Yes, so there's a lovely portrait of a woman playing a gamba that we sort of see with that and she's got one of these gowns on and we see the shoulders sloping and falling again with menswear of the 1650s too.  But yeah, these sloping shoulders that we're seeing in the 1650s would have contributed to that.

You know, the elbows being kept closer to the body, keeping your body front on, the instrument being held lower against the layers of fabric, and then playing like that, being everything being held close in. Yeah, yeah.

So the, the classic gamba playing posture would have worked.

Oh, would have worked perfectly.

Having to stick your elbows out or lift an instrument high just wouldn't have worked.

No, no, so that's why they're instruments. You know, we do still have pictures of violins being played quite low and held quite low.

And then there was often you would accompany yourself by singing and playing the violin.

Yeah, and you could do that because it's not tucked under your chin. So that's our 1605 kind of look there.  Wow, I mean you've got a platform that you could rest your scones on.

Yeah, I mean I'd feel like if I was a man with all that fabric on, I would just feel like putting the instrument next to me, like it would just feel like a stretch holding it the way we do now?

Yeah, I think so, given that there were lots and lots of layers under these too, so you know, again, it's all part of the layering. And also, even though you don't have, like in the 1600s now, you don't have these massive, ruffs in most of Europe. The Dutch held on to the ruffs and these big sort of cartwheel collars for a lot longer than the rest of Europe.

You know, you've got what's known as a falling band, so the lace collars are coming down. You still do have a little bit of a rise on the collars as well. So you've still got, you know, like these collars would not have been necessarily ideal for holding your instrument against it so it's probably going to be held a bit lower, further down the, further down the shoulder.

And we see that in images too, you know, the images slung under the shoulder.  All of this stuff was just mind bogglingly expensive. So not only would you have your portrait painted and that cost an absolute motza, you'd be wearing your absolute finest clothes for it.

Were you saying it was like half a million?

Like Oh, and the rest, like in today's money, in today's outfit would, yeah, just one outfit for the portrait that you're wearing would be half a million dollars plus all the other things that were often in your portrait as well. So they're kind of a bit like a selfie filter where you are. You know, flexing, showing your cash.

So, for example, you know, if you were there playing a gamba in a portrait or playing an instrument in a portrait you'd be showing that yes, you're musical, you're cultured, you're, you know, you're part of this, you know, this ideal humanistic world that values the humanities, but also you can afford One of these really expensive instruments too.

It's another layer of wealth.

It is another layer of wealth, yeah, and there's a lot of layers of wealth in these portraits that get built up. Even things like oriental carpets, they're extremely expensive, so some people would have them on a table. Because they're so expensive that you wouldn't have them on the ground. But then you get like the next level nobility who have them on the ground and it's like I'm so rich I can walk on my carpet.

I'm walking on the money.

Yeah, I'm walking on the money. I'm wearing the money I'm walking on the money and you do like, you've got the jewellery embroidered on your clothing and into your clothing.

You've got this fine handmade lace. You've got everything's embroidered, embroidered with gold. The very finest leathers, everything's like just money, you know, even your wigs are money. Increasingly, we see the rise of wigs.

In the 17th century, the French and German and Dutch painters, they would sort of link the violin to like  booze and gluttony and  stupidity, dishonesty. When you see it in painting, whereas the Italians, it was, it was like a respectable instrument of the court and the theatre. I find it interesting that there was this instrumental competition going on.

There was a tension between the viols and the violins. Yes. Yeah. I talked to cellist James Beck about the tensions between the violin and the viol family. And for people who are listening to this, the viol family is older than the violin family and it's more delicately built and you might say it's maybe got more in common with the lute family in terms of the lightness of the build and so think of it more as a bowed lute.

Whereas the violin is a stronger build. 

More sturdy.

More sturdy, yeah. So the violin family was the, at one stage, the new kid in town. And I think there was, there's always that tension between the old and the new. And I think because the violin came out of Italy and was of Italy and just was such an expression of Italian culture, the Italians were a bit more into it.

And whereas the viol family was utterly dominant in France and in England and in Germany right up until the end of the 18th century and it was really considered to be much more refined and much more aristocratic and much more exclusive  than the violins and the violins were considered to be crass and strident, maybe a bit too loud and maybe only good for kind of crowd entertainments and not for kind of refined family life.

So all the ruling classes and royal houses gravitated towards the viols. So if you look at all the great portraits at Versailles of the royal family, all the, if the women were playing instruments, they were playing keyboard instruments or viols. No one's playing a cello. No one is playing a violin.  Even though they possess these instruments, they were in the vicinity, they weren't for that class of person.

Yeah, whereas if you look at tavern scenes, these street scenes that are a bit more course, that's where the violin is hanging out. And yet it seems to have been embraced from the beginning in, in Italy.

It was,  it was an acceptable instrument.

Yeah. Because, well, it, it evolved, well it sort of went to finishing school in Italy, the violin, and So it must have been, sort of, refined that way for the particular Need.

A need  that they had. Yeah, yeah. And so, there's  a Frenchman called Hubert Leblanc, and he argued in length for the vial which the French did. Like he said, and he wrote this big long treatise called the Défense de la Basse de Viol Contre les Entreprises Violonciel. So it's the defense of the vial, the bass vial, against the enterprises of the violin and the pretences of the cello.

Oh yes, the pretentious cello. 

So he was really like, oh,  we're in danger so, so they didn't want like, you know, the foul violin flooding the musical scene, and that was in 1740. So it was actually quite late, like that's, you know, Strad's, like at the end of Strad, so it was still this thing that was, that was holding on.

But you can see if you were, if you were running a theatre.  And you wanted to give your, be popular, and give a good experience to your audience. You wouldn't be employing the old players because they're too quiet.  Go out of tune. And you'd have to have more of them which would be expensive. Yeah. And so you'd definitely be gravitating towards violins because you just get, you know, more sound for your buck.

And so those orchestras are being populated by violin and cello and viola players. Yeah. And, and the double base, which is the, the, the weird compromise between the, the viola and the, the violin family.

Yeah. It is a bit, I think it's technically, well some of them are made like a vial. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what's interesting is there's another, there's an Englishman John Lenton in 1693. So quite early. But, and he wrote a book called The Gentleman's Diversion or The Violin Explained. So it was, you know, you had people sort of for it as well. And Queen Elizabeth had violins. Elizabeth I.

Yes. Yeah, right. For dancing, possibly.

Yeah. Because she was a big dancer. Yes. Yeah. There's a fantastic portrait of her and she's mid-air.

The toes.

Yeah, you can see the toes hanging out at the bottom of her dress and she's maybe a foot off the ground.

Right, yeah, so yeah, they are, they're the dancing ones. They're not really for sitting around listening to quiet music, which would be a gamber.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And of course, you know, it was a big thing in England to have a consort of gambers. You'd have a, like a large coffer or chest made  and within that would sit, you know, maybe four to six different sized viols. And as a refined family, you would sit around and have a little consort moment, which is the collective noun for viols, a consort of viols.

Oh yeah, yeah. Look, look at that consort of viols arriving.

I think that that 1690s treatise that you were mentioning about basically kind of introducing the violin. The Gentleman's Diversion or the Violin Explained. Yes, I think that's because, I mean there were violins, there were violin makers, there's an early English school of violin making and we know that there were violin makers on Old London bridge prior to The Great Fire. But we also know that when the first Stradivari instruments started arriving in London, that they did, they were passed around and were seen to be quite strange and new. And so maybe there was a renewed taste for these kind of things when the next phase of innovation was coming out of Italy.

And maybe if you're an Italian violinist, that was sort of an exception as well, because you know, you're from Italy, you're playing the violin.

Yeah. Yeah. The Italian thing. Yeah. 

And that's the great thing about Cremona because it was producing violins and violinists right back to the early 1500s. There were Cremonese violin players living in Germany and France and London and it was a, seemed to be a real kind of boasting point of like, yes, here's my Cremonese violinist.

Yeah, it's interesting, you've got this, it was a city and it had the cathedral and it had a cathedral school and they were quite proud that they were very, they were very literate  city. A lot of the children would go, would learn to read and write and, and then you had this. Cathedral School, which seemed to spit out all these good musicians and composers, but because there was just the cathedral, they couldn't really go, there was a ceiling.

There weren't employment opportunities.

No, but even for playing and composing, if you were a composer, you were limited to the constraints of the Council of Trent. You couldn't, compose everything you wanted to. So they had this, they were producing all these. Musicians and composers, but they weren't staying. They had to leave to do anything other than church music, which was quite a limited repertoire. Yeah. So in one way,  it was good. They were making these musicians. And in the other way, by being, by having these constraints, they didn't have a court. So they couldn't, they didn't have anywhere to play secular music.

Yeah. Yeah. And so they had to leave. So you had this, you had the fertile ground, but you also had the conditions that forced those people to, to disperse. Yeah, so, so they were, like if, it was interesting enough to stay, maybe Cremona wouldn't have been as known as it is today because they would have all just stayed there.

So you've got, like the Mantuan Court, they were all there. Yeah, well that's why Monteverde left Cremona.  He went to, he went there, and he ended up replacing another guy who'd come from Cremona. So they were producing them and sending them.

It's like when, you know, the dandelions, you know, dandelions with a big fluffy head, and when you blow on them, the  seeds go over it.

Maybe it's like a blessing in disguise, the fact that it was a little bit boring musical life there, even though they were being well trained.  And to what degree do you think the, the geographical element is like Cremona, it's positioned near forests or near water or near trade routes. So it's a major north south trade route and it's on the Po River and it has, it was a constant point of crossing of armies.

They would all come through there. They were all funnel through. And so, and, and we were talking trade, we're talking no, like wars as well. Like armies. Yes. Lots of armies and trade. And from the trade point of view, you had the river and in that time, moving goods by water was 20 times cheaper than over land because it was just so difficult to, like, roads are not like they are today. Like a road in summer could disappear because it could just be overgrown. Yes. And, or you just couldn't find it or you'd get.  It was just really hard getting things somewhere overland. And that's not just, you know, Cremona in the 1500s.

In the mid 1800s in Sydney, it was cheaper to get wheat from South America  than it was to get it from Goulburn. Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause you've got to.  You had to doing overland and horse and cart and all that. And from Goulburn was more expensive. Than getting it off a ship. Yeah. because you could from South America.

Oh wow. Yeah because you'd get like a really huge ship. You get a huge quantity. Yeah. Oh wow. Isn't that crazy? So even then, yeah. What, 1850s? Yeah. It was like, buy local must buy local water was cheaper than Yeah, maybe that's why we put a jail there. That's the really, that's the really high security jail in Golburn.  It's like, try and get out of here. Oh my god. Go to South America first and then come back.

Yet despite Andrea Amati’s success as an artisan, he is still renting his house, unable to buy a property outright. According to the census of that year, there are four people living in his house. This is probably Andrea Amati, his wife, and the two boys, Antonio Amati and Girolamo Amati. The girl's being married off by now.  The phrase, ‘who had to buy his own bread’, was used in the census to describe Andrea Amati and his family. This meant that he did not own his own house.  Despite this, his workshop was a busy place, with himself and his sons’ producing instruments. One of them for the French king's sister, Marguerite de Valois, no less.  The large tenor viola was made then decorated with gold leaf and a painted monogram on the back with golden fleur de lis in the corners and running the length of the ribs in Latin the phrase by this bulwark or fortification, we stand, religion stands and will stand.

A number of similar instruments like this one were made by Andrea Amati and we could imagine that they were played in the royal courts. Especially at this time in Paris, something quite new at court was happening that necessitated more instruments and musicians,  despite the wars of religion going on in the background and the ever present intrigue and plotting at court. As in Italy, the Renaissance thinkers and artists were creating academies of poetry and music.  The idea was to revive the arts of the ancient world in order to harmonize dance, music, and language. In a way that could result in a higher level of morality, and so was born the court ballet.

Despite universal harmony, music, dance, and the attaining of a higher level of morality, business for Andrea Amati was about to start slowing down, as the tensions in the French court rose.  Marguerite de Valois was not going to be ordering more instruments anytime soon.  She had a lot of other things on her plate. Being the king's sister and the daughter of Catherine de Medici, she didn't really get to choose who she married. So on the 18th of August, 1572, a spring wedding, she married the very protestant Henry of Navarre. There were not the best love vibes, and it ended in the famed Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre. Her mum just absolutely ruined her wedding night.  But what were they thinking? 

So, Catherine the King's mother had a brilliant idea. To calm down the tensions in France between the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots, she would marry her daughter Marguerite to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The very Catholic Parisians at court were horrified that the Protestants were coming back into the royal circle. Catherine's son in law, King Philip of Spain, and the Pope were not happy about the situation. She had not listened to King Philip's advisers to just kill the Huguenots to solve the problem. And so here we are.  Things were getting tense. The court did not attend the wedding. It was a tricky situation. You didn't want to be caught in the crossfire here.

And to add to the soup, Harvests had been poor and taxes had risen. The people of France were not in the mood for an extravagant royal celebration.

I spoke to Dr. John Gagne, Senior Lecturer in History at Sydney University. 

I was reading the different like the spectacles and things and the pantomime for Henry of Neva Neva or Nevaire? Henry of Nevaire's wedding.  He had to do this, like, play where he was which was very sort of  which they were doing a lot, do the sort of play acting type things. And it was for his wedding where he was in a group of Huguenots and they were sent to hell and his brother in law, the king, would come and rescue him and take him out of hell.  And because he's the king and like, restore them, and it was, like, the ultimate humiliation, and then,then, and the next night, he has all these friends murdered, so,  it's like, fantastic mother in law there.

Well, yeah, I mean, so you're talking about the, the Night of St. Bartholomew, which is 1572, when, yeah, the idea is that Henri de Navarre, who was, you know, a Protestant prince, would marry the Margot of France, who was  Catherine's daughter, and that, yes, I mean, that's, That didn't go well because then the Protestant leadership was murdered.

Dr. John Gagne, Senior History Lecturer at the University of Sydney. That, you know, so 1572. Interestingly, the, the columns on the violins Also appear on a medal stamped for King Charles IX right after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. Which, you know, the, the motto around the edge of the medal says  Pietas excitavit justitiam, which is  piety, aroused justice, meaning that, you know,  the Protestants had it coming because true Catholic faith was angered by their existence. And so they were so it's interesting and I think, you know, that I think the columns in that case could be piety and justice. They could, you know, bring in this idea we were talking about earlier of the strength of the monarch in a sort of Herculean fashion, or that, you know, The stability of the, of the nation or the kingdom was strong under him because he had quashed the Protestant rulers,  but, or you know, at least their leadership, not rulers. But yes, I mean that, that began what ended up being a 40  year odyssey for Henri Navarre, who became King Henry IV, in which, you know, he was pulled both ways in both directions. He was, you know, he must have converted three times between Catholicism and Protestantism in an effort to soothe angers on both, anger on both sides and to, frankly, find his way to power as well.

You know, famously, although probably Incorrectly or you know,  mythically, he said Paris is worth a mass. So yes, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of festivities at the wedding would have involved maybe things that might have angered the Protestant, or used, used the Protestant leadership in a way that made them look like they were damned.

Yeah, I was feeling sorry for him. I'm like, he's getting married, and he has to do this, like, humiliating thing where, like, everyone knows he's Protestant, like, you know, and then.  Don't know how he did it. Well, he was just trying to stay alive. Yeah, yeah.

And yet Catherine ploughed on with the wedding festivities, one of them being a pantomime the night after the wedding, organized by herself.  A magnificent, masked ball was held at the Petit Bourbon.  It included the performance of a pantomime tournoi called the Paradise of Love.  King Charles and his two brothers defended 12 angelic nymphs against the Huguenots. They dispatched the Huguenots. Led by Henry of Navarre into hell where, according to an observer, a great number of devils and imps were making infinite foolery and noise.  The nymphs then danced a ballet. There followed a combat between knights accompanied by explosions of gunpowder. The king and his brothers climaxed proceedings by rescuing the Huguenots from hell, which was separated from paradise by a river on which floated the ferryman Sharon in his boat. If that wasn't bad enough, after this cringeworthy and awkward piece of theatre, the remaining festivities had to be called off after an assassination attempt on the Huguenot leader, Admiral Colligny, who was shot from a house by an arquebusier. Married at first sight has nothing on these frolicking wedding celebrations.

So here's what was going on.  To solve the problem of the pesky Protestants, a hit list to remove a few of the key leading nobles of that persuasion, who had come to Paris for the wedding, had been dispatched. And here is where the events took on a life of their own. Instead of killing the 20 odd leaders to make a point, the instigators of this subtle plan may have accidentally ended up putting into motion an event that killed between 5 to 30, 000 people. As the mania spread over the countryside, it ended in a free for all and a full scale massacre.  This may or may not have been the original plan, but at the end of the day it was a disaster for many involved, the effects being felt throughout the country and down into Italy. All the way to the Amati workshop, as the French market would dry up and fizzle out until the country could work itself out.

My name is Susan Broomhall, and I'm the director of the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I'm a historian by training, and I work on women and gender ideologies and assumptions in the early modern period in Europe. I don't believe there's any evidence. I certainly couldn't find any myself of, of Catherine sort of writing to the Amati workshop saying, I'd like to make an order of several, you know, string instruments, and I'd like them to look like this.

Susan Broomhall. 

And I, and I'm sort of saying that laughingly and yet. We actually do have accounts from Catherine where we literally have a letter where she's writing, in one case, to a jeweller and saying, I would like you to make this jewel. And I'm going to draw on the side of the letter, a little picture of what I want the jewel to look like and this is what you should put in it. And these are the stones I want you to use. And this is what it means. It's the most helpful letter ever because it sets out exactly the level of detail she is interested in her artistic work. She absolutely knows what she wants. She knows how to spell it out. She knows how to Draw it, and she basically says, go to make it and we know who it's for. So everything about, you know, that particular commission is watertight. So it wouldn't, it wouldn't be impossible to think that she could order this and clearly her Italian connections, not necessarily to Cremona, but to a network of people who could direct her to the right, you know, string makers, instrument makers is entirely plausible, and it's much more likely in 15, in the early 1560s, if that's when these are commissioned, that it's Catherine who's basically holding the purse strings and not her son 13 year old son, who's, who's making this commission. And yet it would make sense that everything on that commission will be representing Charles because that's the person in whose interests Catherine was trying to make political messages at that point in time.

Yeah, I find it interesting I feel like she, she got a lot of things from Florence  and at that time there was just one violin maker in Cremona and that was Andrea Amati and it, I find it interesting that  she gets these instruments from Cremona and not, not from Florence. And would that have changed the sort of the trajectory of violin making had she got them from  Florence?

Yeah, an interesting question. I mean, we do have letters again from her and letters are such a great source for Catherine where she's writing to her cousin Cosimo who becomes the Duke of Florence. And she writes to him saying, can you find me a good artist?  I'm looking for an artist to do Y. And she's not always saying necessarily, you know, to bring them to France, sometimes she wants to, but often she's saying, I've got this commission and I think somebody over there would be best for it. So depending on the reputation of the Amati, you know, if, if her task is find me the best then perhaps he did. And you know, unless Cosimo has a relationship with the Florentine violin makers and he wants to support them, then I guess he'd write back and say, well, they were the best. But in this case, it looks like that. That didn't happen. But she doesn't have to work through her cousin. She also just, you know, she writes to ambassadors with these kinds of requests. I've seen that too. It's not just, you know, royal friends and family members. She's writing to everyone all the time saying, find me the best person. So she's also cross referencing the information she gets back before she makes a decision. So, This is somebody who's really active in, in sourcing, yeah, sourcing her commissions. She sounds so, she sounds so efficient.  You know, I sometimes look at these letters and think she must've done nothing else all day. Cause I mean, not all of them, they're not all handwritten, but a lot of them are. And when you read into them, the, the level of detail of the sort of issue she's carrying in her head at once just seems phenomenal.

I don't know how she does it.  You know, she did. And I think this, I think that probably tells us too, that this is a real interest for her. She was engaged by the arts and so therefore, you know, it kept her, it kept her attention.

So what does this have to do with violins? Well, war, again. It's bad for business, disturbing trade routes and the economy.  Fortunately, in Cremona, under the Spanish administration, things were relatively calm. But the French market was important, and civil war was not going to help increase business.  So how did Catherine deal with this conflict that was draining the country of even more money that they didn't have to begin with? Well, she organized court festivities.  At Fontainebleau, one of the royal residences, Catherine arranged entertainments that lasted for days. These included fancy dress, jousting, and chivalrous events in allegorical settings.  I'm sure Henry was just having a grand old time with that mother in law of his, and after only just surviving his killer wedding by the skin of his teeth, there were knights dressed as Greeks and Trojans fighting over scantily clad Demoiselles trapped by a giant and a dwarf in a tower on an enchanted island.

The whole thing would end in drama as the tower, losing its magical properties, burst into flames.  In another spectacle, singing sirens swam past the king and Neptune floated by in a chariot drawn by seahorses.

While opera was all the thing in Italy, in France, it was the court ballet.  Susan Broomhall talks to us about these spectacles. 

A line of sight of the viewer looking at them is a kind of, it’s not quite bird's eye, but it's certainly looking down on a diagonal, let's say so you can see the kinds of arrangements that are being made.

And yes, these, these all have meaning. I mean, these have, unfortunately, incredibly complex kinds of meaning that scholars are still debating exactly what the reference points are. This is a culture where people at court are really steeped in classical traditions, quite often esoteric kinds of material. If you think of Nostradamus is a contemporary to this culture, he's part of this culture in fact. And you think about the endless  reinterpretation of the lines of his different works and what they might mean. You might get a, it gives you a little bit of a feel for the kind of complexity of what might be embedded behind both the ballets and the poetry and the arts of the time.

That they have really complex kinds of meanings that aren't. Exactly straightforward to untangle. So they're often classically, they're referencing classical themes. You know, and certainly that's true in the mythology, but they are also referencing things like mathematics at the time early understandings of science. All of this is kind of blended together in a, in a cultural performance that's also trying to do political work. So it's a, lot going on at once. So, yeah.

So if I'm like a courtier and I, like, would I, I would understand all this and go, Oh, look at that. Look at that triangle. Wow. Pythagorean theorem.

And, Oh, did you get that political message? So, I mean, this is kind of what you meant to think, I think. But the fact that you're, I mean, something like this, this, this Ballet Comique publication. Suggest to me that perhaps everyone didn't quite get it and maybe you need it explained to you. Like sometimes we do find kind of explanation books of various ceremonies or let's say an entry to a town that often some of these big big ceremonial moments are accompanied by almost like a handbook and you know sure it's a record of the event but it's also a kind of unpacking of what on earth was being explained in that event. And you know we kind of do it now I'm thinking about recent. Very large ceremonial occasions like the funeral of the, of Queen Elizabeth II or a royal wedding, for example. Often, you know, you might watch that on television and you, and clearly the, the commentators have been kind of given a script to say, Oh, this is what's happening now. And here are the guards coming in and they're going to do this. You know, we have it kind of narrated to us in a certain way to make sense of the different elements. And I think the same thing would have been happening there too. Certainly, sure, the courtiers have a high level of education in things that we now perhaps don't quite know and see straight away. But I think there's also an audience of people who would really like a handbook to help them understand what it was they just saw. And then obviously there's a whole other audience of people beyond the court who would never be able to see this at court. You know, it has a limited audience of prestigious people at court. But some publisher and printer can make an awful lot of money selling the story of it to everybody else who couldn't be there. So, you know, I think people are understanding these things at very different levels.  And so Charles IX, he's, he's died by this stage.

Is that it?

Certainly if we're talking about the 1581 ballet, yes, he's passed away. Yeah. So he's, was he king number two out of the three? Yes. So she has three sons who become kings. The first one is Francois II, and he really only lasts about a year. And perhaps he's most famous for being married to Mary, Queen of Scots. So after he passes away as a teenager, he must only be about 16 when he dies. And I think she would be about the same age. She then returns to Scotland, having grown up at the French court and, you know, various disasters unfold for her on her return to Scotland. So then Francois II, then the king who follows him is Charles IX.

In 1574, as the Civil War rages in France, money is a bit tight. And Andrea Amati has to borrow 90 Lira from a neighbour.  He is able to pay him back over the next five months. But the same year, their youngest son, Girolamo Amati, gets married to Lucrenzia Cornetti, she comes to live in the family home with them.  Andrea Amati, as the head of the family, also receives part of her dowry.

In the next few years, Andrea Amati is finally able to buy the family home, so that in the following census, he is noted as a landowner.  The Amati brothers had a pivotal role in the workshop, helping their father, who was entering his seventies. They were all living and working in the same household, spending a lot of family time together.

Then one cold winter's night on Christmas eve of 1577,  at the age of 72, Andrea Amati died, leaving his sons, the brothers, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati to carry on the family legacy and his business.  Without their father's presence, things would never be quite the same. Antonio Amati, the older brother, was now legally head of the family unit, and would have to deal with the responsibilities that entailed.  It would not always be smooth sailing for the brothers, and they would surprisingly survive incredible odds to keep plying their trade.  But this is a story for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you like what you hear and would be into supporting the podcast so I can make even more episodes, please sign up to Patreon. You can find that on patreon. com forward slash the Violin Chronicle.

This brings us to the end of the series on Andrea Amati, but never fear. In the next episode, I'll be looking at his two sons known as the Amati brothers.  I would like to thank my wonderful guests, James Beck, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Dr. John Gagne, and Dr. Emily Brayshaw. I would also like to thank the Australian Chamber Orchestra for their cooperation and permission to play some of their live tracks, and also to the ABC for permission to play Daniel Yeadon's recording of the Telemann Sonata in D major on his viola da gamba.

It's always great to hear from listeners and if you would like to contact me, you can do so via email on the violin chronicles@gmail.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast at the violin chronicles.podbean.com, and I also have an Instagram with the handle at the Violin Chronicles.  Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I'll catch you next time.

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