Echoing Helicon: Music, Art and Identity in the Este Studioli, 1440-1530

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Contents
Introduction
Chapter I - Music and Identity in the Studiolo
The Studiolo Type
Identity and Self-Fashioning
Music in the Studiolo
The Protagonists
Chapter II - Leonello and the Erotics of Song
The Belfiore Studiolo: Muses and Music
Euterpe's Seductive Harmonies
Eros as Ovidian Muse
Leonello's Musical Poetics
Pietrobono, Companion of Princes
Chapter III - Isabella and the Decorum of Voice
Making Isabella's Studiolo: A Summary
Voice and Decorum
Voice and Legitimacy
Minervan Equivocations
Voice and Agency
Chapter IV - Alfonso and the Eloquence of Bacchus
Making Alfonso's Studiolo: A Summary
Music and Landscape
Trouble on Parnassus: Bacchus' Masculine Eloquence
Viewing, Performance and Identity
Alfonso's Agency
Chapter V - Conclusions: Living Music at Court
Summary
Decorated Space and Musical Meaning
Objects in Performance
Voice and Agency
Imaging the Prince
Figures
Bibliography

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The private studioli of Italian rulers are among the most revealing interior spaces of the Renaissance. In them, ideals of sober recreation met with leisured reality in the construction of a private princely identity performed before the eyes of a select public. The decorative schemes installed in such rooms were carefully designed to prompt, facilitate and validate the performances through which that identity was constituted. Echoing Helicon reconstructs, through the (re)interpretation of painted and intarsia decoration, the role played by music, musicians and musical symbolism in those performances. Drawing examples from the Este dynasty - despotic rulers of Ferrara throughout the Renaissance who employed such musicians as Pietrobono, Tromboncino and Willaert, and such artists as Tura, Mantegna and Titian - author Tim Shephard reaches new conclusions about the integration of musical and visual arts within the courtly environment of renaissance Italy, and about the cultural work required of music and of images by those who paid for them. Relying on Renaissance-era source material from a wide range of disciplines as well as new approaches derived from critical and cultural theory, Shephard provides a fresh look at the music of this ninety-year period of the Italian Renaissance. While much has been written about the studiolo by historians of art and architecture, it has only recently become a growing area of interest among musicologists. As the first English language monograph devoted to the music of the studiolo, Echoing Helicon is a significant contribution to this developing area of research and essential reading for both musicologists and art historians specializing in the Italian Renaissance.

Reviews

Music and Letters

Shephard has opened up methodologies which should enable him, or other scholars, to do the same in the future for families such as the Medici in Florence or the Montefeltro in Urbino. His study deserves a wide readership among historians of music and the visual arts, and particularly among those who work across both disciplines

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