Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa:

What Aesthetics Can Teach Us about Musical

Patronage in the Early Modern Period

CLAUDIO ANNIBALDI

4

Abuilding catches the eye of everybody arriving in Frascati, a small town near

Rome once favored by the upper classes of the city for vacations in the country-

side. It is Villa Belvedere, or Villa Aldobrandini—as it is better known to local

residents—which is built amidst a great park on the flank of a hill dominating the

town. The impression of isolation and remoteness offered by such scenery is striking.

Whenever my research in the archive stored in the attic of the villa brought me there,

I could not help thinking of the “metaphysical” paintings by Giorgio De Chirico.

However, because of the smaller dimensions of the town lying at its feet, such an

impression must have been much greater when the villa was thoroughly rebuilt by

Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571–1621), who had received it from his uncle Pope

Clement VIII as a reward for having masterminded the recovery of the duchy of

Ferrara to the Apostolic See in 1598.1

A gigantic epigraph running around the top of the “teatro dell’ acque” on the

rear of the main building (more De Chirico-like scenery to which I shall return below)

recalls the event that marked the beginning of the political ascent of the twenty-seven-

year-old cardinal as follows:

Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman

Church and son of the brother of Pope Clement VIII, after having

restored Ferrara to the power of the Holy See and re-established

the peace of the Christian Republic, built this villa, supplying it

1

On the villa and its history, see Cesare D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini di Frascati (Rome: Banco di

S. Spirito, 1978). A portrait of Cardinal Aldobrandini by Ottavio Leoni and a detail of an old map by Matthäus

Greuter showing a bird’s-eye view of the villa are included in Frederick Hammond, Girolamo Frescobaldi (Cambridge,

MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), 13 and 61.

62 Frescobaldi

with the water of the Algido mountain, in order to restore himself

with a suitable refuge from the heavy cares of the city.2

By hinting at the peace that the cardinal restored to the Christian world, the epigraph

refers to a subsequent success of his: the diplomatic mission that in 1600–1601 brought

him to Savoy and France in order to end the war fought by those States for the

possession of the province of Monferrato. He had accomplished that mission brilliantly,

on his way to northern Italy after having carried out a minor task given to him by his

uncle: the celebration in Florence of the marriage between the niece of the Grand

Duke of Tuscany and the King of France, Henry IV (who, hindered by said war, could

not be present and sent a proxy).

We should remember that at the end of the sixteenth century Ferrara and Florence

constituted the cradle of modern solo singing and that in Ferrara Cardinal Aldobrandini

could meet the last members of the mythic Concerto delle dame, whose spiritus rector, Luzzasco

Luzzaschi, even entered the cardinal’s service and dedicated two music prints to him,

the second one gathering pieces from the Concerto’s repertory. Furthermore, in Florence

the cardinal was the guest of honor at the first performance of Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s

Rapimento di Cefalo. Last but not least, he enjoyed both productions just a few weeks after

having been the dedicatee of Cavalieri’s La rappresentatione di anima et di corpo. Thus, we can

easily understand why seventy years ago Carl Winter twinned the cardinal’s villa in Frascati

with the Este court in Ferrara among the birthplaces of Baroque solo singing in Italy.3

As regards Villa Belvedere, however, such a definition was quite inappropriate.

When, some twenty years ago, I studied the surviving evidence about the musical

activities patronized by Cardinal Aldobrandini during his ecclesiastical career (1592–

1621), I came to the conclusion that he was, as I called him for want of a better term,

a “mecenate politico”—that is, a patron of music who contacted and patronized important

musicians of his age (besides Luzzaschi and Cavalieri they also included Girolamo

Frescobaldi, Ruggiero Giovannelli, Felice Anerio, and others now forgotten, such as

the three brothers Piccinini, who were virtuoso lute players) not because of a true love

of music but for reasons of social prestige.4

And, indeed, it is quite hard to imagine

2

D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini, 13–14. (“Petrvs card. Aldobrandinvs S.R.E. Cam. Clem. viii fratris

f. redacta in potestatem Sedis Apost. Ferraria pace Christianae Reip. restituta ad levandam opportuno secessv

vrbanarvm cvrarvm molem villam hanc deducta ab algido aqua extruxit.”)

3

Carl Winter, Ruggiero Giovannelli (c.1560–1625). Nachfolger Palestrinas zu St. Peter in Rom (Munich: Musik-

wissenschaftliches Seminar Universität München, 1935), 21–22.

4

Claudio Annibaldi, “Il mecenate ‘politico.’ Ancora sul patronato musicale del cardinale Pietro

Aldobrandini (1571–1621),” Studi musicali 16/1 (1987): 33–93, continued in Studi musicali 17/1 (1988): 101–78

(henceforth MP1 in referring to the first installment, MP2 in referring to the second).

63Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

him as a music lover capable of patronizing if not the birth then the early developments

of Baroque monody, when we read a letter that Francesco Del Monte wrote to the

Grand Duke Ferdinand I de’ Medici a few days before the cardinal’s arrival in Florence

for the royal marriage mentioned above. Speaking of the gifts to be offered to the

nephew of the pope during his sojourn there, Del Monte had no doubt that a perform-

ance of Peri’s Dafne would be suitable, given that it was a small piece and Cardinal

Aldobrandini seemed eager to see it, but a new carriage would be much better, provided

it had not been used by anyone before.5

All this should not surprise readers, especially if they have come across some of

the writings I devoted in recent years to the patronage of music in the Renaissance

and Baroque, whose Leitmotiv is the social relevance of commissioning, practicing,

and consuming music in ages when the protection of the arts was regarded as a proper

accessory of the upper classes.6

In this sense, it was unthinkable that a nephew such

as Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, who, thanks to his extraordinary political successes

and the increasing favor of his uncle, had become the most influential personage of

the Roman court, might fail to obey such a social duty, given the liberality accruing to

his own rank. This is not to say, of course, that a personage such as he would ever fail

to be a point of attraction for any artist or musician looking for the protection that

would support a career in the papal states. Thus, no less than “gran musici” (as Emilio

de’ Cavalieri termed them)7

could be the musicians who followed him to Frascati in

May 1601, very probably including Luzzaschi and Claudio Merulo, who were both in

Rome for a short stay.

Rather, what can puzzle a reader informed about my writings is that, after having

conducted an exhaustive search of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s musical patronage, here I

return to the same subject matter just to reconsider a few pieces of evidence from the

5

For the original passage see MP2, 108. As documented in Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in

Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 196, in Winter 1598–99 Peri’s Dafne was per-

formed in Florence for a chosen audience, including Cardinal Del Monte. It is very probable, then, that Cardinal

Aldobrandini expressed his interest in seeing the piece when Del Monte himself reported on its performance.

6

For a recent study on this crucial aspect of Renaissance and Baroque culture, see Stefano Lorenzetti,

Musica e identità nobiliare nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Educazione, mentalità, immaginario (Florence: Olschki, 2003).

7

I quote a letter by Cavalieri dated May 4, 1601, partly transcribed in MP2, 150 #8, and (apparently

ignoring both my transcription and my remarks on it) in Warren Kirkendale, Emilio de’ Cavalieri “Gentiluomo-

Romano”: His Life and Letters, His Roles as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions

(Florence: Olschki, 2001), 379 #403. It is worth noting that the cardinal’s trip to Frascati reported by Cavalieri

coincided with the days when the architect Giacomo della Porta laid the foundations of the new Villa Belvedere,

as testified to by a handwritten Relazione della Villa Belvedere cited in D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini, 53,

which points out that the first stroke of the spade was taken by the cardinal himself (“dando Sua Signoria la

prima zappata”).

64 Frescobaldi

cardinal’s villa in Frascati, a place of delizie both musical and non-musical that was

“the inanimate thing he loved more than anything else on earth.”8

The occasion upon

which I first met Lex Silbiger some twenty-five years ago, thanks to a paper where I

first dealt with Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini as patron of music, explains only partly

this choice of mine.9

The other part of the explanation is to be found in the viewpoint

that reconsideration of the evidence in question allows me to adopt. This is a viewpoint

that is quite new in comparison with my old essays on the cardinal and especially with

those where I subsequently focused on the relationships of three “maestri”—Luca

Marenzio, Claudio Monteverdi, and Girolamo Frescobaldi—with the system of musical

patronage of their age.10

Those three essays, in fact, approached the pervasive and multifaceted phenome-

non of upper-class patronage between the late Renaissance and early Baroque with the

support of theoretical frames of reference derived from anthropology, semiotics, recep-

tion theory, and music analysis. The present essay, rather, tries to approach this intriguing

phenomenon through a reconsideration of some aspects of Pietro Aldobrandini’s career

as patron of the arts and music from the viewpoint of aesthetics. The term is to be

understood here outside any traditional definition (spatial-temporal conditions of sensibility,

theory of beauty, and so on), rather, according to the structuralist theory of Jan Mukarv

ovský

(1891–1975), a Czech scholar especially active between 1928 and 1948 who enjoyed

late renown some thirty years ago, when structuralism expanded internationally through

the disciplines, and his theory was hailed as “the first attempt in the history of aesthetics

at a systematic semiotics of art.”11

8

(“La cosa che più amava in questo mondo delle [cose] inanimate.”) This definition of the villa in

Frascati recurs in an unpublished letter from the cardinal’s sister dated June 17, 1607 (Doria Pamphilj Archive,

Rome, Fondo Archiviolo, Ms. 146, f. 239r).

9

I refer to a paper for the Frescobaldi Quadrocentennial Conference held in 1983 at the University

of Wisconsin, Madison: “A ‘Ritratto’ of Frescobaldi—Some Problems of Biographical Methodology,” later

published in Frescobaldi Studies, ed. Alexander Silbiger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 30–54.

10

Claudio Annibaldi, “Per una teoria della committenza musicale all’epoca di Monteverdi,” Claudio

Monteverdi. Studi e prospettive, ed. Paola Besutti, Teresa M. Gialdroni, and Rodolfo Baroncini (Florence: Olschki,

1998), 459–75, with an English summary; “Frescobaldi’s Primo libro delle fantasie a quattro (1608). A Case Study

on the Interplay between Commission, Production and Reception in Early Modern Music,” Recercare 14 (2002):

31–63; “ ‘Cantore, musico, maestro di cappella, divino compositore’—la collocazione di Marenzio nel sistema della

committenza musicale del suo tempo,” Studi marenziani, ed. Iain Fenlon and Franco Piperno (Venice: Fondazione

Levi, 2003), 45–66.

11

Peter Steiner, “Jan Mukarv

ovský’s Structural Aesthetics,” in Jan Mukarv

ovský, Structure, Sign and Function.

Selected Essays, ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), xix.

Besides this volume—hereafter cited as SSF—the English translations of Mukarv

ovský’s writings include Aesthetic

Function, Norm and Value as Social Fact, ed. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Slavic Languages and

65Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

* * * *

What led me many years ago to take issue with Carl Winter’s idea of the historical

importance of Cardinal Aldobrandini as a patron of music was a simple comparison

between the cardinal and the most famous lover of music in Rome during his lifetime—

Cardinal Alessandro Damasceno Peretti, a grand-nephew of Pope Sixtus V, better known

as Cardinal Montalto (1571–1623).12

Apart from their being exact contemporaries, there

are interesting biographical affinities between the two men: both were parvenus abruptly

put at the top of Roman society by the election of a relative of theirs to the papacy, both

held offices that also put them at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (Aldobrandini,

as we have seen, was Cardinal Chamberlain of the Roman Church, Montalto was its

Cardinal Vice-Chancellor), and both acquired exorbitant revenues through nepotism.

But the contrasts between them are even more striking, as they range from their characters

to their ways of life. Thus in their twenties, Montalto was described as a young man

“lustful and so fond of pleasures as to neglect almost everything,” whereas Aldobrandini

appeared “in the first flush of youth [to be] totally absorbed in negotiations and con-

cerns typical of aged men.”13

And if the liberality of Montalto always seemed worthy

of a true prince (the wife of a Spanish ambassador once described him as if he were

“born rather than made great”), that of Aldobrandini appeared unable to conceal his

inborn stinginess.14

Literatures, 1970); On Poetic Language, ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (Lisse: Peter Ridder Press, 1976);

three essays included in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik

(Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1976) including “Art as Semiotic Fact,” 3–9, “Poetic Reference,”

155–63, and “The Essence of the Visual Arts,” 229–44; and The World and Verbal Art. Selected Essays, ed. John

Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978).

12

The fullest reconstruction of Montalto’s biography and household to date is to be found in the first

two chapters of John W. Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1997), 1:1–56. Both chapters should be carefully consulted, however, because of the in-

accuracies I pointed out in reviewing the book in Early Music History 18 (1999): 365–98.

13

For the original phrasing of these definitions, which recur in, respectively, a report of a Venetian

ambassador and an anonymous survey of Rome during the first years of Clement VIII’s pontificate, see MP1,

44, n. 42, and my review of Hill’s book in Early Music History (p. 367). It is to be noted that the description of

Montalto as a dissipated young man goes back to 1598, the very year when Cardinal Aldobrandini triumphed

as the brilliant diplomat who had recovered Ferrara without waging war on the city.

14

The testimony on Montalto’s inborn nobility is cited by Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio in a book of

memoirs published in 1648, for whose modern edition see Guido Bentivoglio, Memorie e lettere, ed. Costantino

Panigada (Bari: Laterza, 1934), 59. On Pietro Aldobrandini’s stinginess as a marker of his humble origins

(before his election to the cardinalate it was even necessary to ascertain officially the legitimacy of his birth),

see the passage from Teodoro Amayden’s Vitae Romanorum Pontificum & Cardinalium, quoted in Annibaldi,

66 Frescobaldi

What I found most striking, however, was how differently the musical interests

of the two cardinals—two public people whose lives were under the eyes of a dozen

people daily—were portrayed by their contemporaries. Only Montalto is remembered

as a music-lover in various sources: private letters, books of memoirs, and surveys

on Roman music.15

As regards Pietro Aldobrandini we are told explicitly that he was

“knowledgeable about music” (intelligente della musica) in one of the twenty dedications

of music prints addressed to him, mostly in the years of his greatest political success.16

Moreover, Montalto was fond of solo singing, loved to sing in person and was praised

for graciously and passionately doing so, though his voice was unexpectedly high if

compared to his massive physique,17

whereas Pietro Aldobrandini (a short, asthmatic

“A ‘Ritratto’ of Frescobaldi,” 50, n. 23. It goes without saying that Pietro Aldobrandini had a bad opinion of

Montalto’s financial carelessness. In a cipher of January 1614 addressed to a confidant of his, the former

rejected the financial requests of one of his nephews, complaining of his own need to go into debt in order

to maintain a lifestyle worthy of his rank, and adding: “I do not care that people say that I have nothing [. . .] but

I do not want them to say of me what they say of Cardinal Montalto in these last few days—that if he died, his

family would be ruined.” (Doria Pamphilj Archive, Rome, Fondo Aldobrandini, Ms. 22, ff. 426v–427r: “non

mi vergogno che si dica che ho poco [ma non] voglio che si dica [di me] come si dice del cardinal Montalto

questi giorni pasati [sic] che se fose [sic] morto sarebbe rovinata quella casa.”)

15

Apart from the aforementioned memoirs of Bentivoglio and the well-known survey of the music

of his time by Vincenzo Giustiniani to which I shall return below, suffice it to recall a letter to Enzo Bentivoglio

in which his mother, the Marchioness Isabella, reported on a visit from Cardinal Montalto during her stay in

Rome in 1609. Recently published also by Dinko Fabris, Mecenati e musici. Documenti sul patronato artistico dei

Bentivoglio di Ferrara nell’epoca di Monteverdi (1585–1645) (Lucca: LIM, 1999), 219 #195, the letter reports that

Cardinal Montalto was ready to give up eating in order to hear a certain Neapolitan harpist in the retinue of

the Bentivoglio. In Anthony Newcomb, “Girolamo Frescobaldi, 1608–1615,” Annales musicologiques 7 (1964–

77): 135 #17, the passage is interpreted as if the cardinal “would fast for days” in order to hear the harpist

in question. But it merely means that, in order to keep hearing her, he would eagerly prolong his visit to the

Bentivoglios’ house beyond dinner time—a thing that he probably said as a compliment both to the marchioness

and to her harpist, but that he did not actually do.

16

I refer to the dedication of La rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (notoriously signed not by Cavalieri but

by one Alessandro Guidotti), for whose discussion see MP2, 110–14. All the dedications of music prints addressed

to Cardinal Aldobrandini are transcribed in the first appendix of MP1 and MP2, excepting the one attached

by Giovan Luca Conforti to his edition of Psalmi, Motecta, Magnificat et antiphona Salve Regina diversorum auctorum

octo vocibus concinenda (Rome: Francesco Coattino, 1592), which escaped me because of the general misidentifi-

cation of its addressee with Clement VIII—an error still current, as instanced by the Personenteil of the new

edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (2000), s.v. “Conforti, Giovanni Domenico” by Klaus Miehling.

17

In Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorsi sulle arti e mestieri, ed. Anna Banti (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), 29,

Montalto’s voice is described as “buona da scrivere” (literally, good to be used to write), an expression usually

translated by English-speaking musicologists with the misleading phrase “a scratchy voice” (see e.g. Carol

MacClintock’s translation of Giustiniani’s Discorso sopra la musica, published in one volume with Hercole

Bottrigari, Il desiderio [n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1962], a treatise whose 1599 edition was dedicated

to Cardinal Aldobrandini).

67Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

man with a voice so gloomy that often it was impossible to understand what he said)

very probably practiced singing only because of his ecclesiastical duties—that is, while

celebrating a solemn service in plainchant or assisting the pope in doing so.18

For the

rest, the heterogeneity of the music prints dedicated to him does not allow us to credit

him with any musical preference, just as it happens in other cultural fields, where he

patronized indiscriminately printed books ranging from poetry and the theory of

literature to geography and calligraphy.19

But what made me give up definitively any attempt to equate the musical patronage

of the two cardinals were the musical automata (nine wooden statues representing the

Muses, each of them connected with a pipe of a hydraulic organ) which were installed

in the Villa Belvedere around 1619, just at the end of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s life.20

Different from similar sixteenth-century sets of musical automata, this one was placed

not in the gardens of the villa or in some cave under it, but inside the main architectonic

structure of the “teatro dell’ acque”—a hemicycle-like building with six monumental

fountains fed by the water flowing down through a series of artificial falls from the hill

behind it. In both wings of the “teatro,” in fact, there was a large room, and, whereas

the one on the left was arranged as a chapel devoted to Saint Sebastian—the holy

patron of the Aldobrandini family—the room on the right was reserved for the automata

and the hydraulic organ (hence the name of “stanza delle Muse” or “dell’organo”

given to it in some sources).

The result was halfway between a Wunder- and a Kunstkammer, since there were

some sculptures and fine frescoes by Domenichino, a number of amusing water works,

and a big model of Mount Parnassus that provided the automata with appropriate

18

For the description of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s physique and voice, see Bentivoglio, Memorie e lettere,

30. To my mind, this testimony casts light on the true nature of Felice Anerio’s service in the household of

the cardinal (the service that Aldobrandini generously rewarded in 1594 by supporting Anerio’s controversial

appointment as a successor of Palestrina in the Papal Chapel). That service began, in fact, in winter 1593 when

the prospective cardinal was taking the holy orders that enabled him to sing the Gospel and the Epistle (MP1,

73 #2 and #5), that is, in a period when, more than discovering his fondness for music, he was in some way

learning to sing acceptably.

19

To the authors and titles of non-musical prints cited in the first appendix of MP1 and MP2, the

following ones should be added: Cesare Castelletti’s Oratio habita Romae in Aede S.Joannis Baptistae Nationis Florentinae

(1592), Roberto Bellarmino’s De ascensione mentis (1615), Tommaso Ruinetti’s L’idea del buon scrittore (1619), and

Francesco Rasi’s Narrative affettuose (1620), a fascicle published by the famous singer both autonomously and

as a part of La cetra di sette corde.

20

For archival documents on the construction and maintainance of the automata in question over the

course of time, as well as for a competent description of their technical features and a photographic documenta-

tion of their present state, see Patrizio Barbieri, “Organi idraulici e statue ‘che suonano’ delle ville Aldobrandini

(Frascati) e Pamphilj (Roma)—Monte Parnaso, Ciclope, Centauro e Fauno,” L’organo 34 (2001): 5–71.

68 Frescobaldi

scenery (including the obligatory statues of Apollo and his horse Pegasus) and at the

same time kept out of sight the organ enabling them to play.21

Occasionally, however,

the room also had the function of banquet hall. On June 26, 1620, for example, Prince

Tommaso of Savoy and his entourage—who were in Rome for a short stay—paid a

visit to Villa Belvedere, and the cardinal (an old friend of the prince’s father, Duke

Carlo Emanuele I)22

offered a luncheon to the visitors in the Muses room, appropriately

arranged by his steward Vittorio Lancellotti.

Some years later, Lancellotti published a cookbook with a lengthy description of

the banquet, describing as follows the concomitant musique de table:23

The concluding thanksgiving was accompanied by choice music as

was the initial blessing of the table; in addition there was, from time

to time, the continuous music of the Muses on Parnassus, all playing

several musical instruments, and there was also the organ played by

the force of the water, with many entertainments supplied by several

water works.24

In light of this passage it should be evident why Cardinal Aldobrandini’s automata

eliminate any possibility to include Villa Belvedere among the cradles of modern solo

singing. That the villa was frequented by some famous solo singers of the early

seventeenth century is not in question—suffice it to recall that just a few weeks before

21

Because of the close links that bound Cardinal Aldobrandini to his uncle the pope it is highly probable

that the “stanza delle Muse” was inspired by the arrangement made by Clement VIII in a big niche of the

gardens at the Quirinale Palace, where in 1596 a hydraulic organ was added to a preexisting fountain adorned

by marble statues of Apollo and the Muses. Subsequently these were substituted with musical automata, but

this happened well after the death of Clement VIII and his nephew—the first surviving description of a Mount

Parnassus with musical automata in the Quirinale gardens goes back to 1683. On this issue see Patrizio Barbieri,

“L’organo idraulico del Quirinale,” L’organo 19 (1981): 9–16 and 36–41.

22

Cardinal Aldobrandini had met the duke at the time of his diplomatic mission in France, and had

taken refuge at his court when his relationship with Paul V Borghese, the second of the popes succeeding his

uncle in 1605, began to deteriorate. On the cardinal’s self-exile from Rome between May 1606 and February

1610, see MP2, 122–27.

23

Vittorio Lancellotti, Lo scalco prattico (Rome: Francesco Corbelletti, 1627), 168. Lancellotti dated the

banquet as Friday June 27, 1619. Though accepted by some scholars, including d’Onofrio and Barbieri, this

dating is incorrect, as proven by the unpublished chronicle quoted in MP2, 167, n. 235.

24

“Furono rese le gratie della tavola con musica regalata [NB: regalato=precious or refined, not gifted]

com’anco la benedittione nel principio, oltra poi la musica continua che vi era, di volta in volta, delle Muse del

Monte di Parnaso, che tutte con diversi stromenti musicalmente suonavano, com’anco l’organo che suonava

per forza d’acqua, con molti trattenimenti di diversi giuochi d’acqua.” For the music in question, the cardinal

hired eight musicians and a harpsichord tuner (MP2, 167–68 #6)—a circumstance clearly testifying that in

69Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

the banquet of June 1620, the celebrated soprano Adriana Basile visited the villa.25

But for a host like Cardinal Aldobrandini, who could simultaneously offer his guests

“human” and mechanical music, solemn prayers and amusing water works, naive scenery

and refined frescoes, his musicians were just one means among others for him to play

the role of patron of the arts and music conforming to his rank. It was a role played,

one might say, by inclusion—by exploiting all the fashionable cultural trends available—

not by exclusion—by focusing on one emerging trend as a passionate connoisseur

such as Montalto would have done.26

It was not by chance that the criticism of some

official banquets offered by Cardinal Aldobrandini at the climax of his political career

was precisely their superabundance, as if they tended to overwhelm his guests with a

hodgepodge of delizie that only the nephew of a pope could afford.27

* * * *

The implications of the above-mentioned passage of Lancellotti’s book, however,

go far beyond the light it could cast on Cardinal Aldobrandini’s patronage of music.

I realized this a few years ago, when I came across an unknown, anonymous, and un-

titled seventeenth-century manuscript held in the Doria Pamphilj Archive in Rome (an

archive whose musical collection was fruitfully perused by Alexander Silbiger during

his last years, his house music was reduced to the minimum. On the water works of the “stanza d’Apollo,”

mostly consisting of squirts of water or streams of wind coming unexpectedly from the walls and the floor, see

Barbieri, “Organi idraulici,” 15–16 (a passage that also refers to similar water works installed near the hydraulic

organ of the Quirinale during Clement VIII’s pontificate).

25

See in MP2, 167 #5, the letter written by Cardinal Aldobrandini to Adriana two days after the banquet

for the Prince of Savoy. Moreover a young castrato was in his tenure still in 1619 (MP2, 166 #3), and seven

years earlier the cardinal had been served by Giovan Domenico Puliaschi, a singer to be identified with the

“Giovanni Domenico” cited in Giustiniani’s Discorso sulla musica (p. 71 of the English edition) with three other

famous tenors of the time: Giulio Caccini, Giuseppe Cenci, and Francesco Rasi. On Puliaschi’s service in

the cardinal’s household, see two letters of 1612 published in Susan Parisi, “Ducal Patronage of Music in

Mantua, 1587–1627: An Archival Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989),

104–05, nn. 82 and 83.

26

It is worth noting that, thanks to a gift from Sixtus V, Cardinal Montalto also had his own villa in the

countryside. It was in Bagnaia, near Viterbo, but he did not put any mechanical instrument there, in spite of

the fact that another villa in the neighborhood —the one owned by Cardinal Giovan Francesco Gambara—

was famed since 1585 because it had a hydraulic harpsichord. On this instrument, see Patrizio Barbieri, “Gli

automata sonori di Bagnaia, Parma e Colorno (c. 1585–1724),” Informazione organistica 16 (2004): 210–15.

27

In MP1, 84 #8 and MP2, 118, n. 69, see the ironic comments of Del Monte on two banquets that

Cardinal Aldobrandini offered in 1600 to the Viceroy of Naples and to a group of cardinals, including Del

Monte himself.

70 Frescobaldi

his research on the surviving keyboard tablatures in Baroque Italy).28

Among other

miscellaneous topics, in fact, the manuscript includes the following explanation of the

usage of music in banquets:

Music is used in banquets because it entertains the ears while the

eyes choose and the hands take what can satisfy the taste.29

This sentence struck me for hinting not only at a banquet as a social occasion where

all the five senses of the guests had to be satisfied, but also as two opposite yet con-

current spheres of sensuous experience—one quite devoid of practical implications

(hearing music) and the other bound to basic needs (feeding oneself). Thus I began

to realize that Lancellotti’s description of the banquet in the villa of June 26, 1620 on

one hand (i.e. from the viewpoint of the music played there) closed the case of Cardinal

Aldobrandini as patron of music, but on the other hand (i.e. from the viewpoint of

the contrast between that music and the gastronomic delizie lavished on the cardinal’s

guests) opened up a new view of upper-class patronage of music in the period.

Let us focus on the dozen pages where Lancellotti describes the fifty odd courses

he concocted for his master’s guests. What happens if we were to give up reading

them as a picturesque piece of evidence of how a seventeenth-century maitre-de-cuisine

could sublimate such everyday acts as eating and drinking, and we were to read them,

rather, as the description of an attempt to equalize the different levels of sensuous

satisfaction by rendering the gastronomic level as artistic as the musical one? It happens

that any borderline between art and non-art becomes indistinct and that we begin to

wonder whether nine wooden puppets playing mechanically on a miniature mountain

were actually more artistic than the so-called trionfi, the table decorations executed in

sugar, ice, or butter that accompanied the courses served during the banquet.

It was at this point of conceptual disorientation that the structural aesthetics of

Jan Mukarv

ovský offered me both a convincing answer to questions unanswerable through

common sense, and a manageable theoretical framework for deepening our knowledge

of the patronage of music in the past. Mukarv

ovský’s aesthetics, in fact, assumes a basic

28

In his Italian Manuscript Sources of 17th Century Keyboard Music (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press,

1980), 113–14, Silbiger gave the first description of two keyboard tablatures held there. Subsequently he developed

his remarks on their contents and tried to identify their owners among the members of the Aldobrandini family

in “The Roman Frescobaldi Tradition: c. 1640–1670,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33/1 (1980): 7–77,

80–81, and 84. I discussed the points he made there in the second installment of “L’Archivio musicale Doria

Pamphilj—Saggio sulla cultura aristocratica a Roma fra 16° e 19° secolo,” Studi musicali 11/2 (1982): 292–97.

29

“La musica si usa ne’ banchetti perché trattiene l’orecchio, mentre l’occhio e la mano dessina e piglia

di [che] satisfare il gusto.” Doria Pamphilj Archive, Rome, Fondo manoscritti, Ms. 224, fascicle 26, f. 10v.

71Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

homogeneity between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic experiences, thus enabling us to bridge

any gap between the great musical events patronized by the elites and their everyday

“hedonism”—the label with which we usually dismiss “the richness and variety of

their diet, the elegance of their surroundings, and the care and good taste lavished on

them both in the manner and the matter of their entertainment.”30

“Art is not, however,

the only vehicle of the aesthetic function,” explains Mukarv

ovský, as “any action, any

product of human activity can become an aesthetic sign for an individual or even for a

whole society.31

“This means”—he adds in a later writing—“that structuralist aesthetics

pays attention to the constant interplay of three phenomenal spheres: the artistic, the

aesthetic, and the extra-artistic and extra-aesthetic, and to the tension among them

which affects the development of each.”32

Providing we take into account that Mukarv

ovský uses the adjectives “artistic”

and “aesthetic” in order to distinguish objects or events planned to induce an aesthetic

attitude in the perceiver, e.g. a musical performance, from objects or events able to

achieve the same goal unintentionally, e.g. a natural phenomenon (hence the possibility

of labeling some other objects or events, e.g. the act of feeding oneself, as extra-artistic

and extra-aesthetic), the theory underlying the above-mentioned passages enables us,

first of all, to be aware of the shortcomings of the traditional approach to the history

of musical patronage in Western Europe.

It was because of the commonsensical distinction between upper-class art patron-

age and hedonism that—if I may quote myself—twenty years ago I focused on the

subjective difference between Cardinal Montalto and Cardinal Aldobrandini as patrons

of music without realizing the objective homogeneity of their patronage from the view-

point of their contemporaries, who evaluated the musical events that they patronized

by wondering not whether they were prompted by a true love of music, but whether

they corresponded to the social rank of the relevant patron, just as if they had to do

with the livery of his servants.33

30

I quote here a well-known article focusing on the musical asides of Renaissance banquets—Howard

M. Brown, “A Cook’s Tour of Ferrara in 1529,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 10 (Pirrotta issue) (1975): 216–41.

31

Mukarv

ovský, “The Significance of Aesthetics,” SSF, 21.

32

I quote (after Steiner, “Jan Mukarv

ovský’s Structural Aesthetics,” SSF, xix) an encyclopedic entry

published by Mukarv

ovský in the years 1939–40.

33

I was often criticized by some colleagues for assuming that, in the Renaissance and Baroque, music

was evaluated not only as a means of liturgy, ceremony, or entertainment, but also as a symbol of its patron’s

rank. In the field of cultural history, however, an assumption like that is taken for granted. Suffice it to think

that for some historians of the ancien régime even the form of the most common objects used by members of

the upper classes could symbolize their social rank (see e.g., Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft [Darmstadt

and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1975], 93, n. 44).

72 Frescobaldi

And the same may be said of my subsequent assumption that the correspondence

between a given musical event and its patron’s rank was established by contemporaries

either through matching the event in question with the styles and genres of music

favored by the upper classes or through evaluating it as an original expression of the

patron’s musical sensibility.34

In doing so, in fact, I limited myself to describe more

accurately the difference beween a patron actually fond of music and one supporting

it for a sort of social duty, but I kept on ignoring the homogeneity of the spheres of

art appreciation and everyday hedonism, and, then, the crucial issue of what kind of

social superiority was attributed by contemporaries to the high-ranking personages I

was interested in. In fact, only if we fill in the gap between the two spheres, according

to Mukarv

ovský’s teachings, can we understand that upper-class patronage of music was

something more intriguing than a contributing factor to the development of art music

in early modern Europe.

* * * *

Let us look again at Lancellotti’s description of the banquet offered by Cardinal

Aldobrandini to Prince Tommaso of Savoy in June 1620. The first set of cooked foods

(“il primo servizio di cucina”) consisted of three different courses—the first two based

on fish (the cardinal and the prince, who sat with the Ambassador of Savoy at a separate

table near the Parnassus, were served a seventy-five-pound boiled sturgeon prepared

exclusively for them) and the third one on eggs.35

The last course, however, was served

in dishes “on which there were small covers made of sugar in the color of sea water,

spotted with gold and silver.”36

Thus, even if its ingredients did not include fish, the

third course also evoked the sea—evidently the general theme given by Lancellotti to

34

For the issues synthetized in this paragraph, see Claudio Annibaldi, “Towards a Theory of Musical

Patronage in the Renaissance and Baroque—The Perspective from Anthropology and Semiotics,” Recercare

10 (1998): 174.

35

Lancellotti, Lo scalco prattico, 158–59.

36

Ibid., 159 (“con copertorini di zuccaro sopra, di colore di acqua di mare, tocchi d’oro e d’argento”).

The description of the courses in question and their ingredients, full of obsolete terms that even an Italian

reader with gastronomic competence would find hard to understand, discourages any attempt to translate it

into modern English. The reader wishing to have an idea of Lancellotti’s colorful vocabulary is referred to

his description of the banquet he organized in 1608 for the marriage of Cosimo II de’ Medici and Maria

Maddalena d’Austria, originally included in his Scalco prattico, which is partially transcribed in Lorenzo Bianconi,

Il Seicento (Turin: Edizioni di Torino, 1992), 284–88.

73Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

the banquet, as suggested also by the trionfi mentioned above, most of which were

inspired by such mythological figures as Neptune, Arion, and so on.

In a sense it was an obligatory theme, as the Prince of Savoy made his trip to

Frascati on a Friday—the weekday when Catholics abstain from eating meat. But it is

undeniable that it was developed attentively by the cardinal and his entourage,37

witness

the very idea of serving the banquet in the “stanza delle Muse,” which, thanks to its water

works, was the fittest room of Villa Belvedere for the theme in question, but, because

of its relative narrowness, was also the least suitable for a banquet in grand style.38

Can we doubt that contemporaries (guests, onlookers and, last but not least,

Lancellotti’s readers) evaluated a banquet like that also from the viewpoint of the high

social rank of the host? Whatever comparison might be drawn between the delizie

offered by Cardinal Aldobrandini to his guests and the ones that his peers would offer

to their own guests on similar occasions, nobody could deny that the cardinal was

superior to all of them. The point at issue is what kind of superiority he was credited

with. Among scholars of the patronage of art and music in early modern Europe,

there is a diffuse bias towards what has been brilliantly termed the “politicization of

the aesthetic.”39

As a result, they identify any display of artistic sensibility on the part

of the elite with a display of its social power. However, most sources suggest that

contemporaries tended, rather, to “aestheticize the political”—that is, to credit a patron

of the arts and music with a sort of spiritual superiority.40

To be sure, when contem-

poraries praised Villa Belvedere as “worthy of a great Prince,” it is not easy to decide

37

It is worth recalling that at the time there was a complete identification between a master and his

servants, and that the former was credited with whatever act the latter ones made on his behalf. Not by chance

an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript compiled for instructing an unidentified cardinal nephew

defines his servants as his own “animated tools.” Vatican Library, Rome, Fondo Vaticani latini, vol. 13464,

f. 425v.

38

As Lancellotti himself explains (Lo scalco prattico, 156), he had to give up the “credenza” and to reduce

the “bottiglieria”—that is, the usually sumptuous display of silver and glassware to be used during a banquet.

A display that Lancellotti describes as if it aimed just to prompt the onlookers to an aesthetic attitude, but

that was originally suggested by mere reason of security—the need to put every piece of the dinner service

to be used during a banquet under the eyes of the prospective users.

39

Joel Galand, “The Turn from the Aesthetic,” Current Musicology 58 (1995): 80.

40

For my first approach to this intriguing issue see Claudio Annibaldi, “Uno ‘spettacolo veramente da

principi’. Committenza e recezione dell’opera aulica nel primo Seicento,” Lo stupor dell’invenzione. Firenze e la

nascita dell’opera, ed. Piero Gargiulo (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 31–60 (with an English summary). As regards

the support given by sources to the opposite approach, it is worth noting that scholars inclined to “politicize

the aesthetic” cannot help admitting that the “real function [of music] in social life as a means and symbol of

power was not revealed as such in most of the theoretical writings of the time” (Ivo Supicv

ic, Music in Society:

A Guide to the Sociology of Music [Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987], 304).

74 Frescobaldi

whether they were idealizing the social power of its owner or not.41

But when they

said metaphorically that the Muses deserved the support of the princes because of

their ennobling effects on their supporters—as we read in a rare Latin book collecting

Cardinal Aldobrandini’s views on the virtues of a perfect statesman42

—it is undeniable

that the patronage of literature, arts, and music was regarded as a sign of ethical

superiority, and that approaching this phenomenon in terms of “politicization of the

aesthetic” risks ending up in a cul-de-sac.

Here, too, we find a solid frame of reference in Mukarv

ovský’s aesthetics, and indeed

in his theoretical development as a whole.43

In the first years (from 1928 to 1934), he

credited the aesthetic function with an effect of “de-automatization” inspired by the

Russian Formalist notion of “making strange,” so that “the [art]work is separated by

the automatized context of everyday life and rendered unusual.”44

In the middle period

(from 1934 until the beginning of World War II), he switched from “the study of the

organization of individual works [. . .] to the study of the aesthetic code underlying

these works.”45

In the last period (which ended in the late 1940s), he pointed out the

importance of the perceiver “in transforming any phenomenon—even a natural or

practical one—into a self-centered aesthetic sign.”46

41

Thus the villa was termed twenty years after the cardinal’s death in Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de

pittori, scultori et architetti (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1642), 82.

42

I refer to a book printed in Pavia by Andrea Viani in 1600 and then reprinted in Nurenberg by Nikolas

Hoffmann in 1608 and 1618, with the title De Perfecto Principe ad Clement VIII. Apophtegmata Cardinalis Aldobrandini

in quibus ars imperandi tenetur inclusa ab Henrico Farnesio Eburone Iuris Consulto & Artis oratoriae in Ticinensi Gymnasio

Regio Interprete, in librum unum congesta, atque Regum, Imperatorum ac sapientissimorum Heroum exemplis, ex omni antiquitate

aucta & locupletata. For a discussion of the idea of the princely patronage of the arts conveyed by some of the

aphorisms collected there, see MP2, 113–15. Here I refer especially to the aphorism entitled “Quod Principes

in primis probentur quod Musarum sunt alumni” (That Princes must first prove to follow the Muses’ teachings)

where the reader’s attention is drawn to the positive moral effects of the frequentation of arts, whose followers

are usually disinclined to behave deceitfully.

43

For a thorough survey of Mukarv

ovský’s path as a scholar see Steiner, “Jan Mukarv

ovský’s Structural

Aesthetics,” SSF, ix–xxxix.

44

Steiner, op. cit., SSF, xiv.

45

Steiner, op. cit., SSF, xvi. This phrase—that led Mukarv

ovský, among other things, to regard the opposition

of an artwork to codified norms as a key to establishing its value—is best documented by Aesthetic Function,

Norm and Value as Social Fact, a book of 1936 for whose English edition see n. 11. The most concise description

of the relationships among function, norm, and value was given by Mukarv

ovský in “Problems of Aesthetic

Value,” a lecture of 1935–36: “By function we understand an active relation between an object and the goal

for which this object is used. The value then is the utility of this object for such a goal. The norm is the rule

or set of rules which regulate the sphere of a particular kind or category of values” (quoted in Steiner, op. cit.,

SSF, xxi).

46

Steiner, op. cit., SSF, xxxiv.

75Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

The three stages of Mukarv

ovský’s theoretical work offer different if complemen-

tary keys to how the observer of a thing or an action seized by the aesthetic function

can be prompted to take an idealizing attitude towards the people patronizing it.47

And

if we apply those keys to the mixture of scenographic, gastronomic, and musical delizie

displayed at Villa Belvedere on June 26, 1620, we have to admit that the political and

financial power of Cardinal Aldobrandini was very probably the last thing taken into

account by those who enjoyed the delizie in question. Because of these, in fact, a meal

was transformed into something unusual, to which the need of feeding oneself seemed

almost alien; an official banquet had became a unique experience in light of whatever

code regulating this kind of social intercourse; the artistic and the aesthetic qualities of

the delizie lavished on the cardinal’s guests had put these in front of something “aside

from practical associations,” just as if it were a “self-centered aesthetic sign.”48

This interpretation, of course, presents the problem of the meaning of such a

“sign.” But as soon as we recall that we are referring to an age dominated by humanistic

culture—the culture that had insured the ruling classes a monopoly on good taste and

artistic sensibility—it is easy to understand how an experience so widely exploiting the

aesthetic function as the banquet offered by Cardinal Aldobrandini to the Prince of

Savoy conveyed a public persona of the host that was defined by his sharing not the

social power of his class, but its ethical qualities.

We can therefore begin to grasp the essence both of the patronage of the arts

and the hedonistic train-de-vie of the elites in early modern times, as vehicles for an idea

of their social supremacy that is basically different from the display of power to which

47

As a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Mukarv

ovský was heavily influenced by the structuralism

of Roman Jakobson, who was among the founders of the Circle in 1930. The very notions of aesthetic

function and its dialectical relationship with the practical and theoretical functions interacting with each other in

any human experience of the external world, are close to the notion of poetic function that Jakobson included

among the six functions of any verbal communication (he called the other functions, as is well-known:

referential, emotive, cognitive, phatic, and metalingual). Thus, when Mukarv

ovský writes “No sphere of human

action or human creation is limited by a single function” as “there is always a greater number of functions,

and there are tensions, variances, and balancing among them,” he gives but a paraphrase of what Jakobson

says on verbal messages: “Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly

find verbal messages that would fulfill only one function. The diversities lie not in a monopoly on some one

of those several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal structure of a message

depends primarily on the predominant function.” See respectively Mukarv

ovský, “The Place of Aesthetic

Function among the Other Functions,” SSF, 37; and Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and

Poetics,” Style in Language, ed. Tommaso A. Sebeok (New York and London: Technology Press of MIT and

John Wiley & Sons, 1960), 353.

48

The assumption that “the aesthetic function sets a thing or an activity aside from practical associations,

rather than incorporating it into some of these” recurs in Mukarv

ovský, “On Structuralism,” SSF, 12.

76 Frescobaldi

upper-class patronage of the arts and music has been reduced by a long-established

scholarly tradition.”49

As Mukarv

ovský once remarked,

the aesthetic function compels our attention outside of art so fre-

quently, turns up in so many of the most varied manifestations of

life, and even appears as an essential component of habitation,

dress, social intercourse, and so forth, that we must think about its

role in the overall organization of the world.50

* * * *

The position of Mukarv

ovský could not be more distant from the scholarly

tradition mentioned above, which assimilated into the patronage of music to a sort

of cultural propaganda to be spread on special occasions through unwieldy theatrical

or ceremonial events whose celebrative aims often emerged from the very context of

their performance. According to Mukarv

ovský’s theory, we should take into account,

rather, any musical event (from the extra-artistic to the most permeated by artistic

purposes) able to induce contemporaries to idealize the social superiority of its patron

through an aesthetic attitude conditioned by the humanistic ideology of the upper

classes as arbiter of good taste and artistic fashion.51

As far as I know, the use of the automata of Villa Belvedere for some exotic musique

de table is the only example offered by Cardinal Aldobrandini’s patronage of music

able to show how the aesthetic function could be exploited in the musical field without

any artistic purpose. But if we look at “the manifestations of life” cited by Mukarv

ovský

49

Hence the New Musicological bias towards mistaking humans for political animals mainly moved by

a desire for power (Galand, “A Turn from the Aesthetic,” 89–95). The traditional view of music as a social

symbol is exposed at length in the ninth chapter of Supicv

ic, Music in Society, 273–317.

50

Mukarv

ovský, “The Place of the Aesthetic Function among the Other Functions,” SSF, 31. Of course

there are no metaphysical implications in the locution “the overall organization of the world,” witness the

epistemological orientation that Mukarv

ovský has always claimed for his aesthetics. See the note (translated

into English in Steiner, “Jan Mukarv

ovský’s Structural Aesthetics,” SSF, xi) that in the middle of the 1960s old

Mukarv

ovský appended to a selection of his writings going back to the years 1931–47: Studie z estetiky (Prague:

Odeon, 1966), 337.

51

On this issue see what Vincenzo Giustiniani could write still in 1628 (I quote the English edition of

his Discorso sopra la musica, 72): “the style and manner of singing varies from time to time according to the tastes

of the Lords and great Princes who take pleasure in it; exactly as it happens in the manner of dress, which

continually changes according to the fashion that has been introduced in the courts of the great; as for example

in Europe one dresses in the style of France and Spain.”

77Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

as susceptible to being seized by that function in spite of their extra-artistic nature

(“habitation, dress, social intercourse”), we have extraordinary proof that the first owner

of Villa Belvedere was perfectly conscious of how his public persona took advantage

of the exploitation of the aesthetic function in every aspect of his life.

I refer to a lengthy description of Villa Belvedere apparently written by the cardinal

himself for his friend the Duke of Savoy around 1611.52

The text deals with an imaginary

tour around the villa and its park, beginning from the large avenue that rose smoothly

from the main entrance to Cardinal Aldobrandini’s estate, just outside Frascati, toward

the huge underground base of the villa, where a gigantic mosaic inscription twinned

the cardinal’s name with Clement VIII’s. The hill on which was situated the old building

which the Pope had gifted to his nephew thirteen years earlier had been heavily cut

into in order to supply the new building with an adequate basement. But the text in

question cites none of the architects who had daringly achieved a modification of the

landscape that had rendered Villa Belvedere visible in the distance, well before arriving

in Frascati. It focuses on the unusual proportions of the basement itself that included

two superposed terraces, each so roomy that a tournament might easily be held there,

but so well arranged as not to impede the vista of the villa to those who looked at it

from below, nor the vista of its gardens to those who looked at them from above.

The self-congratulatory tone with which Cardinal Aldobrandini (or his ghost-

writer) keeps on stressing the special features of the villa and its surroundings reaches

a first climax when he describes the panorama that could be enjoyed from the top of

the main building. In fact, the circumstance that such a view encompassed, from left

to right, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the city of Rome, and the Apennines, is interpreted by

him as if nature itself would have enabled Villa Belvedere to dominate the most mag-

nificent “piazza” in the world. A similar climax occurs a bit later, when the text passes

on to the rear of the main building after having described its interior (and having

praised even the spiral staircase connecting its different floors and the position of the

kitchens). The “teatro dell’ acque” was not yet there, though the corresponding side

52

The document in question, held in the Aldobrandini Archive in Frascati, is transcribed in entirety in

D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini, 82–115, where it is dated to 1611 and attributed to Giovan Battista Agucchi,

the art connoisseur immortalized in Domenichino’s famous portrait of him. However, attribution and dating

conflict. Agucchi served Cardinal Aldobrandini for many years and cooperated successfully in the completion

of Villa Belvedere, as instanced by a long letter concerning the arrangement of the relevant park he sent to

the cardinal less than a month before the latter’s death (see Klaus Schwager, “Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandinis

Villa di Belvedere in Frascati,” Romischen Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 9–10 [1961–62], 357–58). However in

1611 Agucchi was temporarily out of the cardinal’s household, as established by Denis Mahon in the essay

“Agucchi and the Idea della Bellezza” included in his Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (London: The Warburg

Institute-University of London, 1947), 112.

78 Frescobaldi

of the hill had already been cut away in view of its construction, but the visitor could

well admire the scenic “scala dell’ acque” (the water staircase)—the long flight of

steps through which the water flowed down from the top of the hill behind the villa

in so picturesque a way that, “as testified by everybody arriving there, might be found

in just a few other places, if at all.”53

However, the most revealing passage recurs at the end of the description of the

surrounding park. “Belvedere ends there but my villa does not,” remarked Cardinal

Aldobrandini,

because I added to Belvedere another villa that is nearby and is called

“La Ruffinella.” And I did so in order that, either on the front side

or on the south and east sides, nobody could dominate my villa

and look in my property from above, but, from all sides, I could be

superior to anybody just as I am for the time being.54

The unexpected identification of the owner with his residence—though consistent

with a man “haughty to the utmost” who regarded himself as the hereditary prince of

a royal family55

—may sound disconcerting. In point of fact, this passage echoes the

“language of forms” so completely permeating the hierarchical society of the time that

the arrangement of the houses during the ancien régime has been regarded as the best

introduction to the analysis of that society.56

Here, however, the identification between

53

D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini, 109 (“a confessione di chiunque vi arrivi, in pochi o in nessun

altro luogo si ritrova”).

54

D’Onofrio, op. cit., 113. (“Qui [. . .] finisce Belvedere. Ma non finisce però la mia villa perché ad essa

ne ho aggionta un’altra, che a Belvedere è contigua et si chiama la Ruffinella, et questo l’ho fatto perché tanto

dalla parte dinanzi, come dalle laterali di mezzogiorno et di levante, non possa essere alcuno che la domini o

guardi nel mio: anzi da tutti li siti sia io superiore come sono adesso”). It should be noted that the Ruffinella

was a further gift of Clement VIII to his favorite nephew, as shown by the archival source indexed in Fonti per

la storia artistica romana al tempo di Clemente VIII, ed. Anna Maria Corbo (Rome: Archivio di Stato, 1975), 37.

55

The remark about Cardinal Aldobrandini’s haughtiness recurs in a diplomatic report sent to the Duke

of Urbino in October 1605, a few months after the death of Clement VIII (Vatican Library, Rome, Fondo

Urbinati latini, Ms. 837, f. 422v). For the cardinal’s self-consciousness see Bentivoglio, Memorie, 40, where the

pages dedicated to him culminate in a passionate deploration of his illusions given that, sixteen years after his

death, the male line of the Aldobrandini was extinguished while their name survived in the female line, thanks

to a legal device. Hence the important role played in the history of the Aldobrandini family by Pietro’s grand-

niece Olimpia, wife of Paolo Borghese and Camillo Pamphilj, whose role in the cultural life of Rome in the

middle Baroque is hinted at in Alexander Silbiger, “Michelangelo Rossi and his Toccate e Correnti,” Journal of the

American Musicological Society 36/1 (1983): 25–26.

56

For a brilliant attempt at studying the French aristocracy of the seventeenth century by starting with

a description of their residences in terms of “Sprache der Formen,” see Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft, 68–101.

79Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini in Villa

Cardinal Aldobrandini and his villa goes far beyond the privilege of looking down on

others, apparently shared by both of them. It recurs, in fact, at the end of a description

of the villa so insistent on the wonders established there by man and nature, as to give

the reader the impression of having been confronted with an artwork in its own right.

Nor is such an idealizing process limited to the villa. Because of the cardinal’s

identification with his residence, the reader is led to extend to the cardinal not only the

villa’s extrinsic quality of being superior to others, but also its intrinsic quality of appear-

ing “aside from practical associations.” Thus Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini ceases to

be the man he actually was—a miser capable of misusing his social power so that the

papal finances met some major expense for his villa.57

He is solely a member of the

ruling class claiming the noblest title of legitimacy of his social power—a love of natural

and artistic beauty proper to a man of superior rank.

At this point, we can easily understand how Mukarv

ovský’s theory about the role

of aesthetic function “in the overall organization of the world” fits the upper-class

patronage of arts and music in the early modern period. It is sufficient to think of

how the world could appear immutable to the lower classes of societies dominated by

individuals whose political and financial superiority was doubled by the exhibition of

the purest spiritual qualities—the patronage of arts and music supported by those

very individuals will soon appear, in essence, as an exploitation of the aesthetic function

instrumental in the preservation of their own social supremacy. And all the more so,

since such a view of an unchangeable world was strengthened by the complementary

notion of the ethical inferiority of the lower classes as such—that is, of those anony-

mous crowds that the old chronicles show in the background of the greatest theatrical

or ceremonial events patronized by the ruling class as if they could only peep at the

outcome of its artistic patronage and at the splendors of its hedonistic way of life.

It is worth noting that, in spite of the centuries that intervened, posterity is not

immune from the wide-ranging effects of such a strategy of cultural domination. The

57

In 1603 Clement VIII made his nephew a supplementary gift of 50,000 scudi, so that Villa Belvedere

could be supplied with the quantity of water needed for the “teatro dell’ acque.” According to contemporaries,

the sum was higher than the total value of the villa but it was entirely charged to the Camera Apostolica, the office

that administered the papal finances under the direction of Cardinal Aldobrandini himself as Cardinal Chamberlain

of the Roman Church (D’Onofrio, La Villa Aldobrandini, 71). In 1605, Clement VIII died and, when his

nephew tried to charge the Camera Apostolica also the expenses for the conduit bringing the water to his

villa, the new pope, Paul V, denied his request. Then Cardinal Aldobrandini refused to pay the artists and the

artisans involved in the construction of the “teatro dell’ acque” (Vatican Secret Archive, Rome, Fondo Borghese,

IV 203, f. 284r, note of Paul V to the nuncio of Spain, December 12, 1606). Even the creditors who took

legal action against him had to wait nine years before recovering a part of the money he owed to them (D’Onofrio,

op. cit., 63, n. 4).

80 Frescobaldi

very personal experience I recounted at the beginning of this essay is a good example

of how an idealization of the ruling classes of the past originated from an uncritical

approach to the art works they patronized. What made me think of the “metaphysical”

paintings by Giorgio De Chirico whenever I saw Villa Belvedere while arriving in

Frascati for my research in the Aldobrandini archive? Surely it was not the idea that

the powerful cardinal nephew who owned it four centuries ago should exhibit a resi-

dence symbolizing his social power. My impression was just prompted by the position,

both isolated and dominant, of the villa in relation to the small town at its feet. The

old “language of forms” is dead, in fact, and, though still belonging to an Aldobrandini

prince, the building’s position no longer symbolizes any of the social rank of its owner.

But it is still sufficient to “de-automatize” our impression of the building as a whole, to

make us see it “aside from practical associations,” to suggest to us a comparison with

our own cultural code so as to describe it as the ideal home for human beings absorbed

in a rarefied spiritual atmosphere.

All this is well-known to cultural historians. Not by chance Norbert Elias has

openly complained of the tendency of posterity to approach the art of the past trans-

lating what contemporaries evaluated as social markers into aesthetic terms.58

And

Mukarv

ovský, in turn, has explained that this tendency depends on the very basis of

the longevity of an art work, since “that which endures is only the identity of a struc-

ture in the course of time, whereas its internal composition—the correlation of its

components—changes continuously.”59

But for this very reason the last teaching of his aesthetics to the scholars interested

in musical patronage in early modern times is a caveat—a caveat about approaching

so complex a socio-cultural phenomenon without a theoretical support enabling them

to control every aspect of its influence on contemporaries as well as their own aesthetic

response to the music that it caused to come into being. It is inside themselves that

historians of musical patronage can analyze the last effects of an exploitation of the

aesthetic function that could not have been more effective, pervasive, and long-lasting.

58

Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft, 92.

59

Mukarv

ovský, “On Structuralism,” SSF, 3–4.