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Arcadelt and Michelangelo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
In his recent translation of the letters of Michelangelo, E. H. Ramsden devotes some space to a discussion of three letters to Luigi del Riccio, the artist's friend and banker at Rome, letters primarily concerned with the setting to music, evidently by Jacques Arcadelt, of one of his poems. The first letter (no. 215: II, 16-17) is somewhat enigmatic in its wording, but the evident meaning is that Del Riccio is to find someone to compose a musical setting of an enclosed poem. The second and third letters (nos. 216 and 217: II, 17-18) indicate that Del Riccio gave this commission to Arcadelt and that the resultant madrigal was sufficiently pleasing to Michelangelo and to others within Michelangelo's artistic circle to move him to reward the composer with a gift of money or of satin or silks. None of the three letters is dated, but Ramsden, on the basis of internal evidence, suggests May or June 1542 for all three.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1965
References
1 The Letters of Michelangelo, 2 vols. (London, 1963).
2 Consilium is believed to have set one madrigal by Michelangelo about 1533, but it: has not come down to us. See Einstein, Alfred, The Italian Madrigal (Princeton, 1949), 1, 159.Google Scholar
3 All the new material is summarized by Clercx-Lejeune, Suzanne, ‘Archadelt,’ in Enciclopedia della Musica (Milan, 1963), 1, 94–95 Google Scholar.
4 These are not attributed to him in the 1539 print, for no composers’ names are given; the purchaser's assumption would have been that all of the madrigals were by Arcadelt. Comparison with other later publications, however, shows that of the sixty madrigals in the Primo Libro at least sixteen are not by Arcadelt. Besides Corteccia, composers well represented in the Primo Libro of 1539 are Festa, Berchem, and Layolle.