Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

Urbino

(Lat. Urbinum Metaurense).

Italian city in the Marche. It reached the summit of its cultural achievement during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, first during the reigns of Federigo da Montefeltro (1444–82; named duke in 1474) and his son Guidubaldo (1482–1508) and then, on the extinction of the Montefeltro line, during the early years of the reign of Francesco Maria I della Rovere (1508–38), who inherited succession. The Rovere rule lasted until 1631, when Francesco Maria II della Rovere abdicated and Urbino, along with such subject towns as Gubbio, Pesaro, Fano and Cagli, was incorporated into the domain of the papal states.

There is little record of musical activity before Federigo's rule. Four chant books used at the cathedral survive from the 14th century, and a document of 1439 mentions that the cathedral then employed 12 singers. During the period of Federigo's rule Urbino became a leading Italian cultural centre. Although court records have not been found, Federigo's support of music is well attested. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci stated that Federigo employed excellent singers and instrumentalists, including six ‘trombetti’, two ‘tamburini’ and two organists, as well as two dancing-masters. The numerous intarsias decorating Federigo’s Gubbio and Urbino studies (for illustration see Clavichord, fig.3) give further evidence of his particular fondness for instruments; according to Vespasiano, he especially liked organs and ‘istrumenti sottili’. Among the intarsias at the Urbino studiolo there is also a representation of the well-known chanson J'ay pris amours, which was the basis of a lauda in the allegorical performance Amore al tribunale della pudicizia produced in honour of Federico d'Aragona's visit to Urbino in 1474. Federigo's fondness for the courtly chanson also prompted him to acquire an important chansonnier (I-Rvat Urb.lat.1411) for his vast personal library. The manuscript, with its many chansons by Du Fay and Binchois, was given to Federigo's court chancellor by Piero di Cosimo de' Medici. Another testament to Federigo's interest in music is the painting La musica (London, National Gallery) by Justus of Ghent, a Flemish painter in Federigo's employ; its allegorical depiction of music, art and science accurately represents Federigo's wide-ranging humanistic interests. Notwithstanding the brilliance of Federigo's court (it was also host to Bramante, Piero della Francesca and Raphael, who was born at Urbino), Urbino was not one of the leading musical centres in Italy; it attained that position only during the reign of Guidubaldo.

Guidubaldo succeeded his father in 1482 and married Elisabetta Gonzaga of Mantua in 1489. Elisabetta, a singer and lutenist, shaped the city's cultural life and helped to make it – along with Mantua and Ferrara – one of the birthplaces of the Italian national style. Among the musical and literary notables who graced the court during this period were the poet-extemporizer Bernardo Accolti (‘l'unico Aretino’), the musician-dancer Barletta (said to be Elisabetta's favourite musician), Cardinal Pietro Bembo, the poet Vincenzo Collo (Calmeta), Bernardo Dovizi (Cardinal Bibbiena, adviser to the future Leo X), whose comedy La calandria had its first performance at Urbino, the sculptor-musician Giovan Cristoforo Romano, the poet-courtier Giuliano de' Medici (youngest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent), the dancer Roberto da Bari, the singers Gasparo Siciliano and Terpandro (the latter famous for his improvising), and Baldassare Castiglione, whose Il libro del cortegiano was inspired by and in part depicts the cultural life at the court. Castiglione wrote that the polyphony of the Franco-Flemish composers was performed at the court (he mentioned a performance of a Josquin motet which, however, no-one liked until it was identified), but it was clearly the lighter Italian frottola style that was preferred, especially when performed by a solo singer with instrumental accompaniment. The court also favoured theatrical productions with music, for example Castiglione's Tirsi, for which the music may have been supplied at least in part by Bartolomeo Tromboncino. The musical chapel of the cathedral, the Cappella del SS Sacramento, received its official charter during Guidubaldo's reign (7 August 1507).

Francesco Maria I della Rovere, adopted nephew of Guidubaldo, succeeded him in 1508. He continued the patronage of music, and his court was host to both the Medici lutenist Giovanni Maria Hebreo and the organist Marco Antonio Cavazzoni (‘da Bologna, detto d'Urbino’), who probably began his association with Cardinal Bembo there. It may have been Francesco Maria I who initially supported the publication of Petrucci's Motetti de la corona (1514–19); Petrucci, born at Fossombrone, was a native of the Duchy of Urbino and returned there temporarily in 1514. By the end of Francesco Maria's reign in 1538, if not before, Urbino, which had been plagued by political troubles from 1516 to 1522, had lost its circle of intellectuals and its standing as a national cultural centre.

During the reigns of the next Rovere dukes, Guidubaldo II (1538–74) and Francesco Maria II (1574–1631), Urbino was only a provincial musical centre. Among the more prominent musicians at the court were Girolamo Parabosco, who visited Urbino in 1548, the Spaniard Sebastiano Ravál, an associate of Victoria, who also had contacts with Francesco Maria II, and Paolo Animuccia, brother of Giovanni and maestro di cappella to the dukes in the 1560s and 1570s. Other items of musical interest are Andrea Gabrieli's madrigal Goda hor beato il Pò (1574), which pays homage to Francesco Maria II and his duchess, Lucrezia d'Este, Marenzio's third book of six-part madrigals, which is dedicated to Lucrezia, and the performance in 1621 of the festival intermedio L'Ilarocosmo, overo Il mondo lieto by Pietro Pace, who spent many years in the service of the della Rovere family. A description of the musical activities at Urbino during the late 16th century appears in the dedication of the Novellette a sei voci (1594) of Simone Balsamino, the Venetian choirmaster who was born at Urbino. The most noteworthy musicians there after the 16th century were Pietro Scarlatti, brother of Domenico, who served as maestro di cappella at the cathedral from 1705 to 1708, P.B. Bellinzani, maestro di cappella 1730–34 and Francesco Morlacchi, an opera composer at the Saxon court from 1811, who was at the cathedral 1807–8.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B. Castiglione: Il libro del cortegiano (Venice, 1528/R; Eng. trans., 1561/R; new Eng. trans., 1967); ed. E. Bonora (Milan, 1972)

G. Radiciotti: Contributi alla storia del teatro e della musica in Urbino (Pesaro, 1899)

G. Vanzolini: ‘Musica e danza alla corte di Urbino nel Rinascimento’, Marche illustrate, iv (1904), 325

G. Radiciotti: I musicisti marchigiani dal secolo XVI al XIX (Rome, 1909)

A. Saviotti: ‘La musica alla corte dei duchi di Urbino’, Cronaca musicale, xiii (1909), 110, 150, 185, 216; xiv (1910), 199

G. Radiciotti: ‘Due musicisti spagnoli del secolo XVI in relazione con la corte di Urbino’, Al Maestro Pedrell: escritos heortásticos (Tortosa, 1911), 225–32

A. Einstein: ‘Ein Madrigaldialog von 1594’, ZIMG, xv (1913–14), 202–14

A. Saviotti: ‘Una rappresentazione allegorica in Urbino nel 1474’, Atti e memorie dell'Accademia Petrarca di scienze, lettere ed arti, new ser., i (1920), 180–236; pubd separately (Arezzo, 1920)

B. Ligi: ‘La cappella musicale del duomo di Urbino’, NA, ii (1925), 1–369

W. Osthoff: Theatergesang und darstellende Musik in der italienischen Renaissance (15. und 16. Jahrhundert) (Tutzing, 1969)

H.C. Slim: ‘Gian and Gian Maria: some Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Namesakes’, MQ, lvii (1971), 562–74

A.M. Giomaro: Strutture amministrative, sociali e musicali nella Urbino dei duchi: la cappella del SS. Sacramento (Urbino, 1994)

ALLAN W. ATLAS