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iThis is the first dedicated study of the musical patronage of a Roman baronial family in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patronage – the support of a person or institution and their work by a patron – in Renaissance society was the basis of a complex network of familial and political relationships between clients and patrons, whose ideas, values, and norms of behavior were shared with the collective. Bringing to light new archival documentation, this book examines the intricate network of patronage interrelationships in Rome. Unlike other Italian cities where political control was monocentric and exercised by single rulers, sources of patronage in Rome comprised a multiplicity of courts and potential patrons, which included the pope, high prelates, nobles, and foreign diplomats. Morucci uses archival records, and the correspondence of the Orsini and Colonna families in particular, to investigate the local activity and circulation of musicians and the cultivation of music within the broader civic network of Roman aristocratic families during the period. The author also shows that the familial union of the Medici and Orsini families established a bidirectional network for artistic exchange outside of the Eternal City, and that the Orsini-Colonna circle represented a musical bridge between Naples, Rome, and Florence.

The first edition of the First Book for five voices of Giovanni Maria Nanino has been lost, and with it its dedication. A close reading of several of the texts in the book offers clues to the date of that first edition and the circle or circles of patronage that may have nourished the book’s origin. This study is concerned principally with the final group of four “occasional” texts in the book—texts apparently referring to particular persons or occasions—and the much-set amorous lyric in the center of the book. I propose that these five madrigals are connected to a circle of patronage in the late 1560s in Florence and Rome, and that the patrons are Isabella de’ Medici, her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini, and his distant relative Cardinal Flavio Orsini. In addition to Nanino I discuss the composers Stefano Rossetti, Filippo di Monte, and Maddalena Casulana.

Leeson reviews A Renaissance Baron and His Possessions: Paolo Giordano I Orsini, Duke of Bracciano (1541-1585) by Barbara Furlotti.