music in venice: a historiographical overview 873
this recent research on institutions other than san Marco has also
debunked another widespread myth, that the musicians in the foreground
of gentile Bellini’s famous painting of a procession in piazza san Marco are
those of the ducal chapel. As Howard Mayer Brown argued in a paper at
the international Musicological society conference of 1977, and i demon-
strated in my 1979 dissertation, these are actually musicians of the scuola
grande di san giovanni evangelista. More recently, through a careful
analysis of the painting and the documentary sources, rodolfo Baroncini
has persuasively argued that although the painting accurately depicts both
the instrumental and vocal ensembles of the confraternity, Bellini has, in
a break from his otherwise realistic depiction, placed together two groups
that normally would have been performing at quite distant sections of the
procession. in other words, the painting is not evidence of performance
by combined vocal and instrumental ensembles but, rather, is an attempt
to show all the principal participants of the procession within one frame.
while musicians employed by the confraternities certainly sang repertoire
similar to that regularly heard at san Marco, they also performed, as was
the practice in confraternities elsewhere in italy, a genre of non-liturgical
religious song in the vernacular known as the lauda. the largest body of
Venetian lauda texts is attributed to the 15th-century poet leonardo gius-
tinian (brother of the first patriarch of Venice, lorenzo giustinian). An
edition of these texts (including many whose attribution is very question-
able), along with actual and reconstructed musical settings, appeared in
Francesco luisi’s splendidly produced Laudario Giustinianeo. A collection
of 15th-century laude from the Veneto, perhaps Venice itself, is preserved
in a manuscript now in cape town, south Africa, published in modern
edition by giulio cattin. there is, however, only one collection of poly-
phonic laude that can be securely identified as Venetian (although where
they were performed is unclear), that by fra innocentius Dammonis, pub-
lished by petrucci as the first book of laude in 1508.
one of the most interesting new developments in the study of sacred
music in renaissance Venice has been the investigation of the spaces in
which it was performed, the churches. when the observant Franciscans of
san Francesco della Vigna rebuilt their church in the 16th century, music
and acoustics were factors in the design, as explored in a 1990–91 thesis
by elena Marion. in this past decade there has been a great expansion of
research in this area, spurred on by two architectural historians, Deborah
Howard and laura Moretti. curious about the simultaneous development
in Venice of new styles of sacred music (in particular polychorality) and
new forms of church architecture (particularly in the designs of Jacopo