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[*]Massimo Ossi (mossi@indiana.edu) is the author of Divining the Oracle: Claudio Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (2003) and of articles on Monteverdi’s music and other Renaissance topics in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Letters, Journal of Musicology, and other journals and edited books. Much of this work focuses on text-music relations and on the cultural and aesthetic context of early modern secular music. His secondary interests focus on Baroque historiography, the music of Antonio Vivaldi, especially the concertos, and mid-eighteenth-century opera, particularly the librettos of Goldoni, in their Venetian cultural context. He was the recipient of the 1993 Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society, has been a fellow of the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, and has held a Summer Fellowship from the NEH. He edits the series “Music and the Early Modern Imagination” for Indiana University Press. Ossi has served as vice-president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music and as a board member of the American Musicological Society. He is on the faculty at Indiana University.
[1] Robert R. Holzer, “‘Ma invan la tento et impossibil parmi,’ or How guerrieri are Monteverdi’s madrigali guerrieri?” in The “Sense” of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts, and Music of the Italian Baroque, ed. Francesco Guardiani (New York: Legas, 1994), 429–50.
[2] On the importance of Marino for Monteverdi, beginning with the sixth book of madrigals (1614), see Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 151–214; as well as Nino Pirrotta’s seminal article, “Monteverdi’s Poetic Choices,” in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 271–316, especially 298–311. Tim Carter offers a more recent assessment in “The Venetian Secular Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, ed. John Whenham and Richard Wistreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183–86.
[3] For a masterful, and still essential, account of the Thirty Years’ War, see C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War, foreword by Anthony Grafton (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005; first published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1938).
[4] On the “Spanish conspiracy,” see John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 520–25.
[5] On the strategic importance of the Valtellina, see Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War, 33–34.
[6] For a detailed account of the Interdict, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 339–555.
[7] See the many passages on Sarpi in Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty.
[8] For an account of the main events leading to Antonio Foscarini’s execution and its aftermath, see Norwich, A History of Venice, 525–29.
[9] On the significance of the War of Mantuan succession, see Geoffrey Russell Richards Treasure, Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France (London: Routledge, 1995), 15–21; and Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War, 239.
[10] James H. Moore, “Venezia favorita da Maria: Music for the Madonna Nicopeia and Santa Maria della Salute,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 37, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 299–355; Jeffrey Kurtzman, “Monteverdi’s ‘Mass of Thanksgiving’ Revisited,” Early Music 22, no. 2 (February 1994): 63–84, reprinted in Monteverdi, ed. Richard Wistreich (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 507–27; and Jeffrey Kurtzman, “Monteverdi’s Mass of Thanksgiving: Da Capo,” in Fiori Musicali: Liber Amicorum Alexander Silbiger, ed. Claire Fontijn, with Susan Parisi (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2009), 95–128.
[11] Steven Saunders, “New Light on the Genesis of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals,” Music and Letters 77, no. 2 (May 1996): 183–93.
[12] Jonathan Glixon, “Was Monteverdi a Traitor?” Music and Letters 72, no. 3 (August 1991): 404–6.
[13] I have discussed the structure and content of the preface to the Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi in my Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 189–210. See also Barbara Russano Hanning, “Monteverdi’s Three Genera: A Study in Terminology,” in Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, eds. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hanning (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1992), 265–90; reprinted in Monteverdi, ed, Richard Wistreich (see ref. 10), 265–90.
[14] An early example of such an encomiastic wedding piece occurs in the Florentine intermedi for Girolamo Bargagli’s La pellegrina on the occasion of the wedding of Ferdinando dei Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589: the fourth intermedio was titled “Viene profetizzata l’Età d’Oro” (The Age of Gold is Foretold), in which a new era of sinless peace results from the union of two “great spirits” in “holy love.” See D. P. Walker, Les fêtes du mariage de Ferdinand de Médicis et de Christine de Lorraine: Florence, 1589. Intermedii et concerti fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963).
[15] William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 106–7.
[16] Theodore K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 27–28.
[17] Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 162, and also his “Artists and Warfare: A Study of Changing Values in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in The Visual Arts and Sciences: A Symposium Held at the American Philosophical Society, ed. Floyd Ratliff et al, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 75, no. 6 (1985), 79–106.
[18] Robert Appelbaum, “War and Peace in the “Lepanto” of James VI and I,” Modern Philology 97, no. 3 (February 2000): 334.
[19] Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 171–73.
[20] Didier Bodart, “‘The Allegory of Peace’ by Abraham Janssens,” The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 878 (May 1976): 308–11.
[21] Anthony Hughes, “Naming the Unnameable: An Iconographical Problem in Rubens’s ‘Peace and War,'” The Burlington Magazine 122, no. 924 (March 1980): 157–65.
[22] Lisa Rosenthal, “Manhood and Statehood: Rubens’s Construction of Heroic Virtue,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no.1 (1993): 104.
[23] On the conflicting interpretations of Callot’s Miseries of War, see Diane Wolfthal, “Jacques Callot’s Miseries of War,” The Art Bulletin 59, no. 2 (June 1977): 222–33.
[24] Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 181.
[25] On the siege and eventual taking of Breda by the Spanish troops, see Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War, 193–96.
[26] Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 178.
[27] Torquato Tasso, La Gierusalemme liberata: Con le figure di Bernardo Castello; e le annotationi di Scipio Gentili e di Giulio Guastavini (Genoa: Girolamo Bartoli, 1590). Reprint ed. Roberto Peliti, with an introduction by Giuseppe Piersantelli (Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Julia, 1966).
[28] All these examples are found in Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 172–88.
[29] Rosenthal, “Manhood and Statehood,” 96–99.
[30] Image taken from “St. Petersburg: Rubens Looted from Germany Discovered at Hermitage, Codart (20 December 2004); www.codart.nl/news/55/ (accessed June 21, 2013).
[31] Iain Fenlon and Peter N. Miller, The Song of the Soul: Understanding Poppea, RMA Monographs 5 (London: Royal Musical Association, 1992). Of the various reviews of this book, see especially Robert Holzer’s in Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 1(March 1993): 79–92.
[32] Fenlon and Miller, The Song of the Soul, chapters 4 and 5. See also Rosenthal, “Manhood and Statehood,” 100–102.
[33] For a discussion of the literary background, structure, and musical language of the Combattimento, see Ossi, Divining the Oracle, 211–40.
[34] David Quint, “Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme Liberata,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 1–29.
[35] Margaret Mabbett, “The Italian Madrigal, 1620–1655” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1989); Peter Holman, “‘Col nobilissimo esercitio della vivuola’: Monteverdi’s String Writing,” Early Music 21, no. 4, Monteverdi I (November 1993): 588; Richard Wistreich, “Monteverdi in Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, ed. John Whenham and Richard Wistreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 275.
[36] Saunders, “New Light on the Genesis of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals,” 190n33, n35.