Both the Italian and Northern Renaissances cultivated music and musicians,
above all for the aura that they gave rulers, princes, and great churchmen. In Italy,
Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), marchesa of Mantua, employed her own musicians—
singers, woodwind and string players, percussionists, and keyboard players—while
her husband had his own band. In Burgundy the duke had a fine private chapel and
musicians, singers, and composers to staff it. In England wealthy patrons founded
colleges—Eton (founded by King Henry VI in 1440–1441) was one—where choirs
offered up prayers in honor of the Virgin. Motets continued to be composed and
sung, but now polyphonic music for larger groups became common as well. In the
hands of a composer such as John Dunstable (d.1453), who probably worked for the
duke of Bedford, regent for Henry VI in France during the Hundred Years’ War,
dissonance was smoothed out. In the compositions of Dunstable and his followers,
harmonious chords that moved together even as they changed replaced the old
juxtapositions of independent lines. Working within the old modal categories,
composers made their mark with music newly sonorous and smooth.
New Horizons
Experiment and play within old traditions were thus the major trends of the period.
They can be seen in explorations of interiority, in creative inventions, even in the
conquest of the globe. Yet their consequences may fairly be said to have ushered in a
new era.
INTERIORITY
Donatello’s Judith, intent on her single-minded task, and van Eyck’s red-turbaned
man, glowing from within, are similar in their self-involved interiority. Judith’s self-
centeredness is that of a hero; van Eyck’s man’s is that of any ordinary creature of
God, the artist’s statement about the holiness of nature.
These two styles of interiority were mirrored in religious life and expression. Saint
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) was a woman in Judith’s heroic mold. A reformer
with a message, she was one of the first in a long line of women (Jeanne d’Arc is
another example) to intervene on the public stage because of her private agonies.
Writing (or rather dictating) nearly 400 letters to the great leaders of the day, she
worked ceaselessly to bring the pope back to Rome and urged crusade as the best
way to purge and revivify the church.
