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ISSN: 1089-747X
Volume 32 (2026) No. 1
Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750: From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy. By Anthony M. Cummings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. [xviii, 456 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-82278-5.]
Reviewed by Jonathan C. Ligrani*
3. Contributions to Scholarship
1. Overview
1.1 Anthony M. Cummings’s excellent history provides musicologists and interdisciplinary audiences with a narrative of the Florentine contributions to music, from the construction of the great sacred and secular institutions of Santa Maria del Fiore and Palazzo Signoria in the late thirteenth century to the end of the Medici regime of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the middle of the eighteenth century. Cummings focuses on connecting the city’s music (both uniquely Florentine and imported genres) to the spaces, patronage infrastructures, and circumstances in which it was created and performed. The book is divided into four large units (“Book the First,” “Book the Second,” and following) encompassing eras of a century or two, each separated into balanced chapters on sacred and secular musical developments and their concomitant institutions.
2. Approach and Structure
2.1 While many studies focus on significant moments in Florence’s musical history, Cummings’s book unites disparate events, styles, and sociopolitical developments into a chronological narrative that bridges the gaps between peaks and valleys. For example, a multitude of works—several by Cummings—address the Florentine origin of the Italian madrigal in the 1520s and 1530s, while others detail the genre’s Florentine resurgence in Medici court festivities later in the century. In his chronological treatment, Cummings confronts Florence’s apparent gap in madrigal cultivation between 1540 and 1560, synthesizing explanations such as James Haar’s argument concerning Florence’s insufficient printing industry compared to that of Venice and the recent work of Philippe Canguilhem on contemporary correspondence and documents that show continuity in the transmission and singing of madrigals among Florentine literati. Canguilhem’s findings necessitate a revised understanding of the genre’s apparent decline. Cummings adds reminders of both the ongoing academic debates in Florence concerning the efficacy of polyphony compared to solo song and Cosimo I de’ Medici’s limited interest in music that did not directly glorify his image.
2.2 Another series of gaps Cummings confronts are the various iterations of Florentine operatic development, which the author usefully partitions into three chapters (15, 17, and 19). He describes these phases as the aristocratic, pan-Italian, and pan-European; together they span the turn of the seventeenth century to 1737. In each chapter, the reader benefits from Cummings’s focus on the institutions and personnel facilitating various productions. This allows readers to understand various intermedi and operas as fully collaborative projects rather than works authored and completed entirely by composers and poets. In chapters 17 and 19, Cummings’s focus on the rise and fall of the opera houses at the Via della Pergola and Via del Cocòmero provides continuity for nearly one-hundred years of operatic history and elucidates the extent to which governing models and economic systems directly impacted repertoire. All the while, Cummings bolsters these institutional discussions with sensitive analyses of the congruence between poetic forms and musical styles at a level easily digested by non-specialists.
2.3 Cummings’s organization of Florence’s musical history around the rise and decline of the Medici provides a valuable structure for observing the city’s musical developments alongside the family whose members were often at the center of patronage mechanisms and institutions. This perspective offers a useful angle for perceiving continuities in Medici appropriation of secular and sacred musical traditions, such as the transformation of canti carnascialeschi (carnival songs) from trade songs bolstering guilds and the city’s republican construction to propagandistic support of the 1512 Medici restoration and the transformation of Santa Maria del Fiore’s service books into family encomia during the same period. Although the merits of this narrative afford useful insights and structure within a vast span of time, there are moments when the Medici telos exercises a pull that overshadows more nuanced discussions. For example, during chapter 1’s exposition of institutional and political developments in the early fourteenth century, Cummings foreshadows the Medici ennoblement of 1532 as the outcome that the aristocratic sensibilities of magnate families are already priming them to accept (p. 9). Indeed, in his conclusion to the book, Cummings states that “The gradual ennoblement of the Medici—though in retrospect seemingly inexorable—was reflected in the adoption of many of the institutions and practices of the historic feudal aristocracy, such as the position of herald or ceremonial jousts” (pp. 345–46). Similarly, in chapter 11, discussion of the Medici return from exile in 1512 bears a sense of inevitability that underplays intervening Florentine debates over governmental models seeking to prevent Medicean rule. Nevertheless, Cummings’s narrative offers a clear and persuasive structure from the perspective of a scholar with longstanding expertise in Medici and Florentine music history.
3. Contributions to Scholarship
3.1 In sum, Cummings offers a valuable synthesis of significant research in major areas of Florentine sacred and secular music from the late medieval to the early modern era. Beyond streamlining diverse research—some of which is Cummings’s own—into a compelling and clear historical narrative, the author contributes valuable arguments in certain areas of discourse. For example, he highlights the relationships between the early madrigalists Bernardo Pisano and Philippe Verdelot to the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII as a strong driver of their interest in polyphonic settings of secular poetry, in contrast to the accompanied solo songs preferred by patrician classes across Italy in the Quattrocento (pp. 149–50). Other important considerations include Cummings’s caution against uncritically presenting the Florentine Camerata and the Medici pageantry between 1539 and 1589 as monolithic drivers toward the advent of opera. To be sure, there are substantial contributions from each, but Cummings rightfully stresses a nuanced approach in drawing causal lines. Finally, the large temporal span and diverse traditions covered in Cummings’s study permit the author to make several intriguing “macroscopic” insights about the “forces that shaped Florentine culture throughout the late-medieval and early-modern periods and transcended developments in any one realm of creative activity, whether music, literature, or the other arts” (p. 345). These insights include the intriguing tendency of the people of Florence to “close in on themselves” and prioritize innovation over sustained development, forces that unite and help explain the twin phenomena of the Italian madrigal and early opera both arising in Florence and then advancing elsewhere. Overall, scholars from diverse fields possessing an interest in the social, cultural, political, and economic forces connected to Florence’s development of many pivotal contributions in the history of Western music will benefit greatly from this volume.
[*] Jonathan C. Ligrani (jcligrani@ua.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Alabama who specializes in manuscript studies and the cultural history of Renaissance music. His 2024 dissertation at Columbia University, entitled “Manuscript Culture and Patrician Identity in the Florentine Madrigal,” explores the social, musical, and political world of four manuscript collections of madrigals constructed in 1530s Florence, demonstrating the volumes’ integration within patrician manuscript culture and distinction from the tenets of musical print. His work also appears in Current Musicology, The Literary Encyclopedia, Notes, and Renaissance Quarterly.