Ep 6. Andrea Amati Part 3 The painted Violins of Charles IX

Artificial Dolphins, heavenly spheres and Catherine de Medici taking her tween King son on a royal tour of the land to the sounds of Amati violins, this episode has it all.

 Step into the opulent world of 16th-century France as we uncover the captivating story of the court of Catherine de Medici and a set of royal violins commissioned for her son, Charles IX by the violin maker Andrea Amati.

In this podcast, we embark on a journey through the rich cultural tapestry of the Medici dynasty and their influence on the arts. Delve into the fascinating intersection of music, power, and intrigue within the court, where the resplendent sounds of violins played a pivotal role in shaping the Renaissance era.

Music heard in this podcast is as follows.

Aco home casts -  Timo-Veikko Valve

Bloom – Roo Walker

Make believe – Giulio Fazio

Banquet of Squires – Jonny Easton

ACO Home the Home – Liisa Pallandi and Timo- Viekko Valve Sonata representative

Unfamiliar faces – All good folks

Industrial music box – Kevin Macleod

Transcript

  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.

 

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