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\"Under the rule of Henry VII (r. 1485-1509) England became a powerful nation. The Tudor court sought to express its worldliness and political clout through major artistic commissions, employing Florentine sculptors and painters to create lavish new interiors, suitable for entertaining foreign dignitaries, for its royal palaces. These were exemplified by Henry VIII's palace of Nonsuch, so named because no other palace could match its magnificence. Italian sculpture, painting, and tapestries of the day reflected an interest in portraiture and dynastic monuments, epitomized in England by the royal tomb projects created by Baccio Bandinelli, Benedetto da Rovezzano, and Pietro Torrigiani. Generously illustrated throughout, The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance traces the artistic links between Medicean Florence and Tudor England through essays by an international team of scholars and explores how the language of Florentine art effectively expressed England's political aspirations and rose to prominence as a new international courtly style\"--Provided by publisher.

Contemporary commentary on the quality of English choirs in early Tudor times is rare but one frequently cited example recorded by a visiting ambassador in 1515 displays the diplomatic effectiveness of their existence. A second example just a few years later which compares two choirs show that not only was the king determined to have the best for his royal household chapel, but that other household chapels were equally fine. The importance of these other chapels is generally overlooked with only a few musicological studies of individual chapels having been undertaken in the past.This thesis sets out to show that, in common with the royal household chapel— the Chapel Royal—these other regional early Tudor organizations were vibrant, thriving and capable of performing the complex English five-part polyphony, and that the Chapel Royal was not alone in providing domestic musical liturgy of a high standard. They show a network of musical contacts and transmission and of a change in the nature of the household in line with aspects of the political changes in the royal household organization. By contextualising the existence and support of the household chapel organization, we see a manifestation of political imagery and magnificence.Through archival searches and checks, fresh evidence has been found of payments to named singers and composers supporting ideas of more frequent transmission of ideas and repertoire. New analytical approaches to evidence of chapel organization lead to a new understanding of flexible approaches to staffing the chapels through analysing the complex rota systems in place.Details of named personnel in two of these chapels, who are also known to have held positions in other chapels, display a level of freelancing, which, when combined with ii the rotas that appear in early Tudor household documents, show a flexible workforce and widespread transmission of personnel and repertoire. Further evidence also shows a corpus of active composers that existed beyond the body of composers from the Chapel Royal and major collegiate chapels, and that these composers were competent enough to provide the complex five-part polyphony required of them by their elite patrons.The piecing together of other evidence relating to chapel goods also display a change in the organization of the early modern household to a more permanent, principal residence. All the evidence shows that far from being the sole source of domestic liturgical musical accomplishment, the Chapel Royal was one of a number of similar organizations in pre-Reformation England, with a large pool of accomplished singers and composers, and that a transmission network of musical ideas of performance and composition was common and effective.

Patronage of travelling performers by English kings seems to have been one way of displaying royal power, prestige, and status. Beginning with Edward IV and continuing through Henry VIII, queens and royal offspring also gave their names to travelling performance troupes. Chronologies of the travelling troupes of queens and royal offspring suggest that during the reign of Henry VIII, as queens and heirs presumptive changed, one likely purpose of these troupes was to advertise and legitimize the status of their royal patrons.

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father was the center of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture. It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.

The aim of this paper is to place the projected tomb of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon within a wider context of events that are specifically of a political and economic nature. The artists are at once pawns in the hands of diplomats and financiers motivated by their inner rationale, as well as actors in their own right, discovering in a somewhat tentative way that, though not entirely free from the system of patronage of either institutions or princely families, they could jostle for position on the international stage, relying almost entirely on their own enterprising skills. The episode of the tomb, far from being a footnote in the history of the competition between Michelangelo and Bandinelli, offers an unusual insight into the workings of Medici patronage at a very delicate time in the history of both Leo X and Cardinal Giulio de' Medici. The favour accorded to Baccio Bandinelli precluded, during Leo's lifetime, the possibility that any other sculptor would be offered even a chance of being a candidate for this commission. The death of the pontiff left the Cardinal not only in a political quandary but also in dire financial straits. Yet the support and loyalty of the English monarch were crucial to Giulio de' Medici's success in his own endeavours to ascend the papal throne and, perhaps more importantly, to preserve Medici control over Florence. The trusted members of the Medici entourage representing both Florence and the family's interests at the court of Henry VIII, prevented the tomb project from dying altogether. The involvement of Giovanni Cavalcanti and his business partners Pierfrancesco de' Bardi and Zanobi Girolami, as well as that of Giovanni Gaddi, was financial since each partner bought stakes in the models prepared by a number of artists, but at the same time aesthetic judgement had to be exercised by one if not all the investors in selecting the authors of the models sent to London in 1521–1523. This opened the way for sculptors who had previously suffered from Bandinelli's overbearing dominance: namely Baccio da Montelupo, and Jacopo Sansovino.