At length, I hope to write more on my interest in the lyric and narrative poets of Cremona in the early 16th century, and the profound influence which I believe shaped the cultural acceptance of the city towards embracing Andrea Amati’s new form of instrument, but this blog is more about the painters in Amati’s world, specifically the Campi family of painters, architects, knights and historians, amongst the most accomplished Renaissance men and women of the age (in Cremona, at least). As architects they were certainly capable of appreciating, if not contributing, to Andrea Amati’s designs. As with John Rose in London, I am not writing to dilute the influence and inventiveness of Andrea Amati, but to embrace the idea that the Cremonese development of the violin is not isolated but a part of broader intellectual networks to which he ultimately had access.
From 1506-1509 the Ferrarese painter of the early Renaissance, Boccaccio Boccaccino (c. 1467 – c. 1525) came to Cremona to paint his most celebrated works, the frescos of at the city’s Duomo. His presence has something to do with the training of the brothers Galeazzo (1575/7-1536) and Sebastiano Campi who also contributed to the painting of the cathedral, as well as to the church of Sant’Abbondio – one of Cremona’s landmarks for those us interested in the early musical iconography of the city. (Confusingly it is off a street renamed in modern times as Via Amati with no apparent connection to the family). Sebastiano is a mere footnote in history but from the children of Galeazzo, the dynasty of Cremonese painters progressed that spanned the sixteenth century, and with them a characteristic mannerist style of painting. The collaboration between brothers and cousins is such that often it is difficult to tell precisely which member of the family undertook a particular painting or the extent of collaboration between them, a state of affairs that is profoundly familiar to those of us looking at the Amati family and the extended community of violin making in the city.
Galeazzo’s large family produced three sons that became painters, Giulio (1502-1572) from one marriage and from a later marriage Antonio (1522-1587) and Vincenzo (1530/1535–1591). Bernardino Campi (1522-91), arguably the more famous of the Campi clan seems to be a distant relative, but nonetheless part of the tight group of Cremonese painters. His father Pietro was a goldsmith with whom he trained, and afterwards he became a pupil of Giulio Campi before moving to Mantua to continue under Ippolito Costa before returning to Cremona in 1541, shortly afterwards becoming the teacher of Sofonisba Anguissola and her sisters. Hence, it is with a full awareness of the different bloodlines of the Campi family, that it nevertheless makes sense to write of them as a one coherent colony of artists.
The humanist scholar, Marco Girolamo Vida (who has, I believe, a big part in the story of Amati’s emergence) commissioned Giulio for a number of works. The most significant project was the reconstruction and decoration of the small Chiesa delle Sante Margherita e Pelagia in Cremona, for which he was titular prior. Giulio served as architect for the project that was completed in 1547. With his brother Antonio they produced the frescos for the interior, and finally Antonio produced the twelve terracotta statues representing the apostles. Twelve years earlier Vida had completed his Christiad, the neo-Virgilian epic of the life of Christ (commissioned by Pope Julius II, and completed under the rule of Leo X), a work that had significant international audience at the time. The Romanised architectural scheme and the Frescoes of the life of Christ all demonstrate the embedded relationship that the Campis as architects and artists enjoyed with the personalised requirements of their patron, considered one of the greatest humanist scholars of the Catholic church at the time. It was probably through Vida’s direct connection to the Vatican that Sofonisba Anguissola had her introduction to Michelangelo, and perhaps through a similar route that Amati’s work became familiar to the Vatican-raised Catherine de Medici.
To God the Greatest and the Best. For Giulio Campi, the very famous architect and painter, who, after he conquered art, competed with Nature and progressed beyond that which is the greatest in that genre, for their supremely deserving father from Galeazzo, Curzio, and Annibale through their piety, therefore in the year of our Lord 1584. So reads the epithet to Giulio Campi in the atrium of the church of Sant’ Abbondio from his adoring sons. My attention however, is a little more focused on his brother Antonio whose significance is greatly enhanced by his publication as an antiquary and historian of Cremona Fedilissima right at the end of his life in 1585, charting the known history of the city from Roman times. He adds Cavalero (Italian in the text) or Eques (Latin in his engraved portrait), both approximating to Knight to his list of accomplishments. Campi had employed Agostino Carracci to undertake th engraved oval portrait is to be found in Cremona Fedilissima, and a re-engraved reversed portrait is also to be found from around the same period.
There are a few slight differences between the two images, in particular the addition of a medallion to the later loose-leaf engraving and generally a lower quality of engraving – the shading in the background is more linear and less subtle that on Agostino Carracci’s original engraving. However both of them contain one detail that proves unexpectedly important, which is that the near-facing eye (the right eye on the Fedilissima engraving) shows very clear cross hatching around the lower part of the eye, resembling the kind of permanent disfigurement that arises from an orbital fracture, and with the title of knight (Equis/Cavaleri) it is quite likely that the wound is emphasised in order to validate the military experience that earned him the title.
Agostino Carracci’s portrait engraving becomes interesting in respect of a painting in the National Gallery in London labelled as a Portrait of a Musician presently attributed (possibly) to Bernardino Campi. (It should be noted that aside from these engravings Carracci’s significant interest in terms of this blog is It is a testimony to the closeness of style from one Campi to another, that it may just as easily be by Giulio or Antonio and the ‘possible’ attribution in reality is limited to this handful of Cremonese painters. Given what I have to say about it, it would be eminently preferable to sustain the National Gallery’s attribution to Bernardino, but I cannot help feeling it is at least equally likely to be the work of Giulio, especially when comparing the Netherlandish-inspired black background to other portraits of either artist. The feature that draws me most to this painting is not only the superficial likeness to the portraits of Antonio Campi, but we see in paint the same disfigurement, which convinces me that the painting, whether by Bernardino or Giulio Campi, or as becomes a stronger argument as this article progresses, the logic for the painting to be a self-portrait by Antonio, the following reasoning provides a compelling argument to identify the sitter as Antonio Campi.
The portrait has the superficial title of Portrait of a Musician, thought to be painted around 1560, but as far as musical portraits of the period are concerned it is an outlier, as we shall see presently, but there are more urgent elements of the composition to be examined first of all.
Here there are three elements that present a biography of the sitter. In one hand he has a pair of dividers, a trope that repeats itself as an identifier of architects, mathematicians, astronomers and others learned about proportion, but in at least one other portrait, Pierre Woeirot’s 1562 engraving of Gaspard Duiffprougcar (Gasparo Tieffenbrucker) the use of dividers to denote that the sitter is primarily a maker or inventor of musical instruments provides a useful concordance.
The indication that the sitter is musical does not come from the spinet in the background, so much as the depiction of his right hand in which a careful view shows that the fingers are spread and the thumb tucked under, as if to connect with the base of the middle finger. It is recognisably the Guidonian hand, and indicating position 5, D-Sol-Re, which means that the sitter is thinking through the tetrachords of music for singing by sight. Essentially it is this – not the musical instrument that identifies the sitter as a musician in the sixteenth-century gaze.
There are fewer portraits of a sitter with a spinet in the sixteenth century than we might otherwise expect. Highly significant amongst them are two self-portraits from Cremona by Sofonisba Anguissola painted shortly before her departure for Spain in 1559 – and another self-portrait by Lavinia Fontana, an artist eminently influenced by her. (The subject becomes much more popular from the late sixteenth century, especially under Dutch influence – i.e. Jan Vermeer’s Woman at the Virginals).
Having understood the symbols surrounding the two hands of the sitter, we can delve into the contradiction of the spinet’s location, for almost universally when a sitter is using a keyboard instrument as part of their biography, they are positioned as if to play it (they don’t need to be actually playing it and seldom do, as I explain in my blog on musical representation subject to Ekphrasis and the Paragone). If we are to read not only the separation between the spinet and the sitter in the Campi painting correctly, then there is obviously a sense of ownership. Campi’s hands are expressing both his musical and architectural skills without recourse to anything else. On that basis, we find a persuasive argument that Antonio Campi is making a claim to be the architect (or maker) of the spinet behind him. … when we take in the extent of Sofonisba’s two paintings, it becomes more and more likely that the subtly biographical portrait of Antonio Campi must ultimately question whether it is more likely to be a self-portrait forming part of a group of similar portraits most significantly by Sofonisba in the 1550s.
The catalogue of the 2006 Andrea Amati: Opera Omnia exhibition makes the compelling case for members of the Campi clan being the painters that decorated the Charles IX Amati set, and hence providing a strong link between the two. Although we are yet to find anything in Campi’s painted works that provides incontrovertible evidence going the other way, nevertheless Antonio Campi’s apparent claims to degrees of authorship, as applied to the spinet in the background of his (self[?])-portrait suggests the kind of universal understanding of music and the mathematical sciences required of an instrument maker, and described by the Bolognese doctor Leonardo Fioraventi just a few years later in Della specchio di scienta universale (Venice, 1573).
Ingenious men, those who are rare in any profession could not become esteemed if it were not for the fact that they knew and worked with varied and diverse materials. He who would be esteemed in the art of musical instrument making must firstly be a painter in order to know how to design the form of the instruments; secondly he must be a Smith in order to make tools to proportion his art; thirdly he must be a Master Wood Worker in order to make the mechanics of the instrument; fourth, he must be a Musician in order to make well the proportions of the voicing, the consonants of the instruments; lastly he should be an Alchemist in order to know the preparation of the metals with which to make the strings as he must know the metals also to make the organ pipes … He who would discover everything in his art would discover a multitude of diverse things, as if it were an deluge and would never ever find an end, much and deep and of great practice and science it is.
To give some idea of the prowess that Antonio Campi enjoyed, his final work in 1585 was the great antiquarian history Cremona fedelissima citta et nobilissima colonia de Romani : rappresentata in disegno col svo contado et illvstrata d’vna breve historia delle cose piv notabili appartenenti ad essa et de i ritratti natvrali de dvchi et dvchesse di Milano e compendio delle lor vite. (A digital version from the internet archive can be found here.)
Bernardino, Giulio and Antonio Campi all present the intellectual powers and motivations that could have been called upon for a project such as Andrea Amati’s design of the violin. As for Sofonisba Anguissola her qualities as a humanist scholar as well as a painter were so great that Catherine de Medici’s appointment of her as a Lady-in-Waiting to the fourteen year old Elizabeth de Valois in 1559 was for the young queen’s educational improvement. Any one of these figures represents the wider Renaissance milieu of scholarly learning that was being developed in Cremona, and into which Andrea Amati must inevitably have formed a part. Did he create the violin solely as his own enterprise (or with Antonio, his eldest son?), or was it created for him by the artists and architects, or in collaboration drawing on their advice and understanding? The replicateable design concepts that flow into every model and form both by Andrea, and by the generations that followed him show that Amati was in control of the system, and that it was something that other makers were equally able to understand, so authorship sits effectively in Andrea’s realm. The importance of this is to show that for whatever feats of brilliance can be attached to Andrea Amati’s creation of the Cremonese method of making violins, and the form that remains fundamentally unchanged for centuries, the idea of a solitary genius doesn’t work. Instead, as we learn more about his life and times, it will become increasingly self-evident that Andrea Amati’s feats of craftsmanship owe themselves to the society and events that surrounded him.
There is one last element to tie up, which is a cittern with a similar circular brand to those found on other citterns by Girolamo Virchi and Gasparo da Salo in Brescia, leading to the assumption that it is also from Brescia. However the device of three heads of barley, the agricultural economy of Cremona for which this crop played an enormous part (in the 20th century the Motorised Brigade “Cremona” used a sheaf of barley as their symbol). There is not enough of a possibility to say anything with certainty, but we cannot discount this as a Cremonese instrument given that the trail of clues leads plausibly in that direction.
It is helpful to examine the symmetry between my comments of Andrea Amati my work elsewhere on English makers of the sixteenth century, and how they pose various questions about the nature of the community in which invention and innovation existed. (You can read my blogs on the system of geometry here, and the method of calculating proportions here). In London the pre-eminent maker of stringed instruments from the middle of the sixteenth century was John Rose, and there is strong evidence that he was in receipt of royal patronage. The scholar Kerry McCarthy has done much in her recent biography of the composer William Byrd to bring to light the intellectual realm in which he existed thanks to the emergence of books from his library, placing him in an intellectual milieu into which Rose’s geometric schemas naturally fall. In the same group of people patronised more widely by the court and its attendants is the mercurial figure of John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s wizard who spent much of the middle of the sixteenth century translating the books of Euclid’s elements into English. His own critique of the work, styled as a mathematical preface poses the purpose of more learned scholars and architects, as well as creating a hierarchy that understood in a very human way the lack of necessity for artificers to understand all of mathematical philosophy in order to competently carry out instructions made by those who were more learned.
For the English court, the employment of such a figure as John Dee implies that the services of a wizard were always on-hand. This either means that a viol maker such as Rose could depend on the intellectual skills of others in their milieu, that they had the ability to discourse ideas, or that they belonged to circles within society where they were able to express and invent their new ideas. – in short, if Rose hadn’t come up with a geometrical scheme himself, it would probably have been Dee’s job to devise it. There is always the possibility that I am narrowly applying one set of observations to entirely different circumstances, but I do not believe this to be the case. Instead I regard this evidence of normalised behaviour that extended across cultures.
