Importing the Renaissance and Civilising the Court

When François I ascended to the throne, the French court and the realm had a reputation in Western Europe, but especially throughout the Italian peninsula, as being skilled at arms but uncultured. The Italians knew firsthand of the ferocity with which the French waged war. From 1494 until 1559 successive French kings raided and conquered large portions of Italy, campaigns that are known today as the Italian wars or the Habsburg–Valois wars. Italians frequently referred to the French as ‘barbarians’, a word that derived from the Greek for one who stutters but which was often hurled at indigenous peoples of the Americas who lacked written language.Footnote ¹⁴ Defending against this reputation, Joachim du Bellay titled the second chapter of his La défense et illustration de la langue Françoyse ‘That the French language should not be called barbarous’. In it he discussed the brilliance of French martial glory, which he claimed the Italians could not withstand, and defended the French language from barbarous accusations by the Italians: ‘not only have they [the Italians] done us wrong by this, but to render us still more odious, they have called us brutal, cruel and barbarous’.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, the perception of the French language as barbarous by European elites was echoed by Erasmus in 1530 when in his essay De pueris instituendis he described the ease with which

Due to a combination of their martial ferocity and perceived lack of interest in letters, accusations of barbarism dogged the French in European discourse throughout the sixteenth century.

It was under this shadow of barbarism that François I made efforts to ‘civilise’ the French court and project a reputation of cultured brilliance.Footnote ¹⁷ Baldassare Castiglione, in Il libro del cortegiano, first published in 1528 but written earlier and ostensibly recounting a conversation that took place over a span of four days in the year 1507, admitted that ‘the French recognise only the nobility of arms and esteem all the rest as nothing; in a way that not only do they not esteem but they abhor letters and consider all men of letters to have little value’. Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, responds with a positive impression of a changing court culture:

According to the Duke of Urbino, François I could save France from barbarism through his love of letters. In 1529, François I created the new office of lecteur du Roi (charged with reading aloud to the king), and Jacques Colin was the first to hold this office. At the king’s behest, Colin translated Castiglione’s influential book into French in 1537, suggesting royal recognition of the usefulness of this depiction of the French king in such an influential and widely read work.Footnote ¹⁹

Through his mother Louise of Savoy, an avid lover of books and Italian art, François inherited a fascination with advances in arts and sciences in Italy.Footnote ²⁰ He founded a royal library, charged the humanist Guillaume Budé with enlarging its collection, and employed agents in Italy to acquire rare books and manuscripts. In 1527, for one example, he provided an agent with 1,000 écus to purchase ‘livres et antiquailles’ in Rome.Footnote ²¹ His cultivation of humanism in France led, at the urging of Budé and Du Bellay, to the founding of the Collège des trois langues, dedicated to the study of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He also became a patron of Italian artists, including the sculptor Juste de Juste, the painters Fiorentino, Primaticcio, Lucca Penni and Antonio Fantuzzi, the polymath Leonardo da Vinci, the furniture maker Francesco Scibec da Carpi, the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, the ceramist Girolamo della Robbia and the architects Domenico da Cortona dit ‘Boccador’ and Sebastiano Serlio.Footnote ²² The Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, who briefly visited the French court in 1518, worked as one of François’s many agents in acquiring works of art, although according to Vasari he squandered the money and never returned to France. At Fontainebleau around 1540 François also surrounded the chateau with a new Italian Renaissance garden reflecting classical ideals of beauty and order. On 28 June 1528 he married his cousin and sister-in-law Renée de France to Duke Ercole II d’Este of Ferrara at a ceremony at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Five years later, on 28 October 1533, he married his son Henri (afterwards Henri II) to the Florentine Catherine de’ Medici. These marriages solidified Franco-Italian bonds, created allies for France’s Italian campaigns and insured continued northern-Italian cultural influence at the French court.

The absorption of the Italian Renaissance and support for humanism also shaped royal musical establishments. François I recruited the Milanese lutenist Giovanni Paolo Paladino, known in France as Jean-Paul Paladin, to his court in 1516. In her analysis of court records, Christelle Cazaux has shown that by the end of the 1520s François I’s Écurie (stables) consisted of two bands of jouers d’instruments: a French band consisting of violons and an Italian band consisting of saqueboutes and hautebois.Footnote ²³ These ensembles, both the French violons and Italian saqueboutes and hautebois, performed at occasions of state, such as fêtes, solemn entries, banquets, balls, religious processions, and funerals.Footnote ²⁴ The Italian musicians would have brought with them their Italian instruments, thereby shaping the sonic experience of court festivities. By 1529, the same decade in which the Italian band was active at court, the renowned Mantuan virtuoso lutenist Alberto de Ripa (Albert de Rippe) became joueur de luth du Roy.Footnote ²⁵ Cazaux suggests that François I perhaps recruited the celebrated lutenist through Lazare de Baïf, the French ambassador to Venice and father of Jean-Antoine de Baïf.Footnote ²⁶ (The younger Baïf would later become one of the founders of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique.)

In the 1550s, Charles de Guise, cardinal of Lorraine, accelerated the absorption of Italian artistic and musical influences in France. François de Guise, count of Aumale, married Anne d’Este (daughter of Renée de France) in 1548, thereby solidifying a political and familial alliance between the house of Guise and the duchy of Ferrara. Charles de Guise, François’s younger brother, cultivated an interest in the latest Italian fashions. When he departed Rome in 1550 after spending several years residing there, he shipped twenty-five cases of statues back to France.Footnote ²⁷ In 1552, the cardinal de Lorraine purchased the palace of Meudon, which had been the residence of François I’s mistress Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, duchess of Étampes. Primaticcio designed a grotto there to house the cardinal’s antique statue collection. Under Primaticcio’s supervision in 1556–7 Italian artists including dell’Abbate, Domenico del Barbiere and Federico Zuccaro completed the work, and the grotto functioned as a private museum for the cardinal’s collection.Footnote ²⁸ Around the same time the singer and composer Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder and his two brothers also entered the service of Charles de Guise in Lorraine.Footnote ²⁹ Charles further had a salon installed on the first floor to house his collection of antiquities. The Guise family, soon to lead the militant and uncompromising Ligue catholique in the Wars of Religion, aligned themselves politically with an Italian faction at the French court, and patronised the Italian artists François I had lured to France. Italian fashions began to shift, to signify not only an interest in humanism and noble refinement but also a political alliance projecting a confessional identity, as increasingly violent conflicts shifted battlefields from the Italian Peninsula to France itself.

The French court likewise continued to accumulate both southern and northern Italian musicians and instruments under the influence of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici. In 1552, the Italian lutenists and singers Fabrizio and Luigi Dentice came to the French court as part of the entourage of Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno. Sanseverino accompanied his own singing of Neapolitan songs. A few years later the Neapolitan bass singer Giulio Cesare Brancaccio joined them at the French court.Footnote ³⁰ A disputed legend claims that between 1564 and 1574 the Cremonese luthier Andrea Amati delivered a set of violins to the queen regent of France, Catherine de’ Medici, on behalf of Charles IX, her son with Henri II. These Italian violins, each of which was painted with Charles IX’s coat of arms on the back, would have been played by a band of Italian violinists also brought to the French court.Footnote ³¹ Some of the Italian violinists working at the French court originated from Cremona, and in 1572 Charles IX gave Nicolas Delinet 50 lire to purchase a violin in Cremona ‘per il servizio del Re’ (for the service of the King).Footnote ³² The Queen’s violin band participated in court spectacles such as the Balet comique de la reine in 1581. Some of the music for this ballet was composed by the bass singer Girard de Beaulieu and was performed by Beaulieu and his wife, the Genoese soprano Violante Doria. Although there were no Italian musicians documented as viol players for the French court (Beaulieu accompanied himself playing what Jeanice Brooks has identified as a lirone), northern Italian influence permeated French musical establishments in the sixteenth century.Footnote ³³

Viols at the French Court

Possibly the earliest mention of the viol in France comes from an Italian source. In a letter written in Rome from Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, to Ercole I d’Este, duke of Ferrara, on 3 September 1498, Cesare asked Ercole to lend him his ‘violas arcu pulsantes’ (violas played with a bow) for a diplomatic mission to France, where such instruments, he claimed, were highly regarded.Footnote ³⁴ Under Ercole d’Este’s regime, Ferrara developed into an important center of musical experimentation and performance. Lewis Lockwood has shown that the city ‘supported the growth of a vitally important school, even a dynasty, of viol players’ owing to the presence of the renowned Della Viola family.Footnote ³⁵ It was perhaps players from the first generation of this dynasty that Cesare brought with him on his diplomatic mission to the French court. This letter offers evidence that it could have been Cesare who first introduced viols to the French court.

Only six months before Cesare’s letter Louis XII had abruptly become king of France.Footnote ³⁶ From 1501 to 1504 he was also king of Naples, a prize from the second of three Italian military campaigns during his reign. During this campaign, it was Cesare who occupied both Milan and Naples as condottiero (mercenary leader) for the French crown. On 17 August 1498, Cesare had announced his decision to resign the cardinalate. He then married Charlotte d’Albret, sister of John II of Navarre, and Louis XII named him duke of Valentinois. The diplomatic mission referenced in the letter was probably a trip to France to negotiate his wedding, during which time he was named condottiero. Eager to impress the French court, he spent lavishly on clothes and other finery for this trip, and part of that projection of wealth might have included requesting to borrow the famed Ferraresi viols.

The reign of François I offers the first sustained evidence of the use of viols in France. A copy of ‘L’état des officiers domestiques’ of François d’Angoulême, the future François I, lists four musicians of the chapelle as ‘violeurs’ in 1514, but in all other court documentation they are described as singers.Footnote ³⁷ During this period viols often appear in descriptions of diplomatic events or political celebrations, such as in Cambrai in 1529 when a four-part viol consort from the household of François I performed to entertain Marguerite of Austria at a conference.Footnote ³⁸ Similarly in Rouen in 1532, for the entrée of Éléonore d’Autriche and the Dauphin, the muse of lyric and erotic poetry or hymns, Erato, appeared holding ‘une violle et ung compas’ (a viol and a compass).Footnote ³⁹ In 1543, François I created the musique de la chambre division of the royal household, an independent entity from the musicians in the service of the chapelle. Although dedicated viol players were not added at this time, most musicians performed on multiple instruments, and the creation of the musique de la chambre was an essential step towards Henri II adding two viol players four years later.

Although viols were known in France during François I’s reign, evidence of their broad use begins to accumulate during the reign of his son Henri II. As mentioned above, in 1547, the first year of his reign, Henri II reassigned Jean Bellac and Pierre de Champgilbert, alias Pierre d’Auxerre, two players of the violon in the Écurie, as players of violes in the musique de chambre. The following year, as part of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici’s sumptuous entrée, the Florentine community of Lyon staged a performance of Cardinal Bibbiena’s Calandria. These expats, beaming with civic pride at the new Florentine queen of France, summoned a famed theatrical troupe from Florence. In the play, a song is performed ‘by a single voice accompanied by five lutes, a violone da gamba and a spinet’. Later another song is performed ‘to the sound of two spinets, four transverse flutes and four violoni da gamba’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As early as 1548, Henri II had arranged the betrothal of his son François II to Mary, Queen of Scots. The marriage occurred at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on 24 April 1558. The Discours du grand et magnifique triumphe was published in Paris in May to commemorate and publicise the wedding ceremonies and festivities. A large ensemble of musicians dressed in red and yellow livery performed outside of Notre Dame. The festival book names ‘Trompettes, Clairons, Haulxbois, Flageolz, Violes, Violons, Cistres, Guiternes & autres infinis’ (trumpets, bugles, shawms, recorders, viols, violins, citterns, gitterns and infinite others) playing together melodiously.Footnote ⁴¹ Viols in sixteenth-century France are consistently associated with Italians, with political or diplomatic maneuvering, and with public ceremonial and courtly display.

Henri II died in 1559 from a wound inflicted during a jousting tournament held to celebrate the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, which formally concluded the Italian Wars. In an undated letter offering condolences for his untimely death, one of the king’s former servants addresses Catherine de’ Medici, now Queen Regent of France. The retired servant claims that the king took great delight in singing the psalms, as translated by into metrical verse by Clément Marot, to the accompaniment of ‘lutes, viols, spinets and flutes’.Footnote ⁴² Musicians capable of performing on these instruments, of course, were all employed by the royal household and placed in the musique de Chambre. Less evidence of viols survives from the fourteen-year reign of Charles IX, possibly due to the raging Wars of Religion. During his reign, however, Léonor d’Orléans, the duke of Longueville, visited Berne, where he was entertained by ‘the viols of Lausanne’.Footnote ⁴³

During the reign of Henri III viols continued to appear as part of diplomatic and political festivities. In 1573, the year before he would be crowned king, three viols are depicted on a tapestry commemorating a ball held by Catherine de’ Medici at the Tuileries Palace in honor of Polish envoys.Footnote ⁴⁴ These envoys were visiting to present the throne of Poland to Catherine’s son Henri, duke of Anjou, the future Henry III of France. Upon the death of his brother Charles IX, Henri III abandoned the Polish throne, traveling back to France through Venice. During his stay in Venice, 17–27 July 1574, accounts of his expenses include a gift of 40 écus to ‘the German Martha and her husband, who were twice sent for to sing and play the lute and viol’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Four years later the ‘viols et violons de Poitiers’ provided incidental music for a tragedy, a comedy and a farce performed by les Enfants de la ville (an umbrella association of festive societies) in the Halle neuve. The performances were attended by ‘plusieurs gentilshommes, damoiselles et autres estrangers’ (Several gentlemen, damsels and other foreigners).Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1584, following the path forged by his colleagues Jean Bellac and Pierre d’Auxerre in 1547, Jean Fourcade was promoted by Henri III to serve as a ‘violiste de la Chambre’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Henri IV, owing in part to his Huguenot faith, has been depicted as less of a melomaniac than his Valois predecessors and Bourbon successors.Footnote ⁴⁸ Florence Gioanni, however, has discovered payment records for broken string replacements suggesting that Henri IV learned to play the lute. She has further discovered evidence of ‘a little viol without strings and a little broken’ in an inventory from the Château de Nérac.Footnote ⁴⁹ Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonie universelle, recounts an anecdote that occurred sometime after 1589, when Henri IV ascended to the throne, and before 1600, when the viol player Granier died. In the household of Henri IV’s wife, Marguerite de Valois, Granier, playing the bass viol, enclosed a young page inside his instrument. The page sang the soprano part while Granier sang the tenor and played the bass line on his viol.Footnote ⁵⁰ While historians have been puzzled as to how a child singer could have fit inside of the body of a bass viol, no one has observed that this probably would have been a large Renaissance viol. If replicating string lengths close to northern Italian viols of the time, this instrument would have a body length (a better indicator of size than string length) of roughly 93 cm, which using modern terminology would be classified as a violone. As Jean Rousseau reminisced in his 1687 Traité de viol:

Mersenne’s context makes it clear that he is discussing a six-string viol. These large types of French Renaissance viols could easily conceal a young page singing the dessus.

Jacques Mauduit, according to Mersenne, was the viol player responsible for adding the sixth string to French viols. After the death of Jean-Antoine de Baïf in 1589, Mauduit continued to offer concerts in the tradition of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, but he began to focus increasingly on instrumental music. The Huguenot poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, a self-professed member of the Académie, claims in an undated letter sent to Odet de la Noue to have heard in Paris ‘un excellent consert de guitare, de douze violes, quatre espinettes, quatre luts, deux pandores & deux tuorbes’ (an excellent ensemble of guitar, twelve viols, four spinets, four lutes, two pandoras and two theorbos).Footnote ⁵² Sauval claims that Mauduit’s concerts ordinarily had between sixty to eighty people, sometimes as many as 120.Footnote ⁵³ Mauduit spent time in Italy, and it is possible that he brought the Italian six-string viol and its tuning to France during this time.

Evidence from Henri IV’s reign also suggests that viol consorts appeared regularly with theatrical troupes, especially with the comédiens du roi (Actors of the King), a theatrical troupe that performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. In March 1598, two theatrical companies – one represented by Valleran Le Conte and called comédiens du roi and another led by Adrien Talmy and called the compagnie de comédiens français – signed a three-year contract ‘to perform together comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, pastorals and other works agreed upon in this city of Paris, as well as elsewhere in this kingdom of France’. According to the terms of the contract, Le Conte provided costumes, stage properties and a chest of viols with which his viol quintet would perform entr’actes. On 22 March, Fiacre Boucher leased from the Confrères a loge des dépendances, a balcony from which the viol consort would perform.Footnote ⁵⁴ In March, Valleran Le Conte, leader of the comédiens du roi, contracted to teach the fifteen-year-old Nicolas Gasteau ‘the science of acting … to learn to play the spinet, the viol, and to sing music’. The contract was dissolved five weeks later.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Saint-Maxent in 1599 a company run by Adrien Talmy performed ‘plusieurs histoires, tragédies et comédies avecq Musicque et voix, violes et regales’ (several histories, tragedies and comedies with music and voices, viols and regals).Footnote ⁵⁶ Back in Paris on 3 May 1606, Valleran Le Conte, in order to pay his actors, was forced to sell his chest of viols, his wardrobe of costumes and eleven painted backdrops to one of his actors.Footnote ⁵⁷ On 1 December of the following year, Le Conte founded a new company with Nicolas Gasteau, Estienne de Ruffin, Hugues Gueru (later known as ‘Gaultier-Garguille’), Savinian Bony, Loys Nyssier, Jullien Doielles, Gasteau de Rachel Trépeau and an unnamed second female actress. Le Conte furnished the costumes, viols and backdrops suitable for the aforesaid performances of comedies, tragicomedies, pastorals and other plays’.Footnote ⁵⁸ On 8 April 1609, Jacques Le Messier, the father of Pierre le Messier (later known as Bellerose), contracted an apprenticeship for his son with Valleran Le Conte, which included viol lessons. In addition to providing him lodging, food and clothing, Le Conte promised to teach Pierre ‘la science et industrie de représenter tous trage-comédyes, comédyes, pastoralles et autres jeux, ensemble à jouer de la violle’ (the science and industry [required] to represent all tragicomedies, comedies, pastorals and other plays, together with how to play the viol).Footnote ⁵⁹ The use of viol consorts in the French theater has been an understudied aspect of the history of the viol in France, yet strong documentation survives of their persistent connection to theatrical performances.

A Marketplace for French Viols: Viol Luthiers and Bourgeois Amateurs

Although nobles commissioned ornate instruments made from exotic materials direct from luthiers, playing the viol was not confined to noble amateurs and professional musicians in courtly settings. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, a marketplace for viols emerged to cater in part to bourgeois amateur musicians. Inventories of instrument shops and luthiers reveal a stock of new and used instruments available for sale to the public. Gaspard Duiffoprugcar, the most celebrated luthier in sixteenth-century France, was recruited to build instruments for the French court. He set up his instrument shop in Lyon, however, at a time in which viol tutors, often including intabulated music such as four-part Parisian chansons, became available to amateurs who played consort music in their leisure time. Duiffoprugcar, although Bavarian by birth, was probably recruited from northern Italy, and he maintained business links with other luthiers of his extended family in Padua and Venice. Through his recruitment to France, he therefore served as an agent of the transfer of instrument-building techniques from northern Italy, and his relocation must be understood within the broader context of successive French kings collecting Italian artists and artisans.

Inventories of instrument shops from the middle of the century demonstrate that luthiers offered viols of all sizes for sale to the public – both professional musicians and bourgeois amateurs. On 23 March 1551, an inventory made after the death of Philippe de la Canessière, facteur d’instruments, lists ‘Item deux grand viollons garniz de leurs estuitz, une violle et ung petit viollon garniz de leurs archetz prisez ensemble L s.t.’ (Also two large violins furnished with their cases, a viol and a little violin furnished with their bows; valued together, 50 sous tournois).Footnote ⁶⁰ On 27 November 1553, François Bonnin or Bonvin, aged 15, son of Antoine Bonnin or Bonvin, enters into an agreement to become a servant and apprentice at the shop of Denis Viger, ‘faiseur de guitares, luths, violes et autres instruments’ (maker of guitars, lutes, viols and other instruments), in the rue Saint-Victor. Viger agrees to provide Bonvin with food and a salary.Footnote ⁶¹ On 2 June 1556, in an inventory made after the death of Yves Mesnager, facteur d’instruments, lists ‘Item une bassecontre de violle de deux tailles non parfaictes prisez ensemble X l. tz.’ (Also a bass viol in two imperfect sizes; valued together, 10 L.t.).Footnote ⁶² These inventories and others often specify when an instrument is Italian in origin, which is always listed by city or region of manufacture. Northern Italian instruments were appraised at higher values than domestic instruments. On 1 October 1587, an inventory created after the death of Claude Denis, facteur d’instruments, includes bows, strings from Florence and Siena, a ‘bass viol from Brescia’, a ‘double bass viol from Cambrai’ and two old ‘dessus de violles’.Footnote ⁶³ These inventories demonstrate a thriving marketplace for viols, bows and strings. The growing French viol marketplace, however, relied not only on importing instruments from Italy, but also on recruiting luthiers like Gaspard Duiffoprugcar to relocate to Lyon.

Gaspard Duiffoprugcar (Tieffenbrucker) was a member of a family of instrument builders from the village of Tieffenbruck, near Roßhaupten in Bavaria.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1810, Choren and Fayolle, in their Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, provided a biographical portrait of Duiffoprugcar’s early career in France:

François I met Pope Leo X in Bologna in 1515. During this sojourn the French king recruited Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in France until his death in 1519. Duiffoprugcar’s birth in 1514, however, invalidates the legend of François I recruiting the luthier from Bologna in 1515 (or his being in Lyon in 1520). Branches of the Duiffoprugcar family had workshops in Venice, Padua and Bologna, so Gaspard Duiffoprugcar’s relocation to northern Italy would have been a logical choice for the young luthier seeking to establish himself while relying on family connections.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ian Harwood and Giuio Ongaro postulate that Gaspar was a close relative or son of Ulrich (I), who, as I will discuss below, was a luthier who worked in both Bologna and Venice.Footnote ⁶⁷ Dates conflict as to when Duiffoprugcar settled in Lyon; both 1533 and 1546 have been suggested,Footnote ⁶⁸ but archival evidence survives only from 1548 when he rented a house from Maître Pierre Pelu and is referred to as an ‘Honorable homme Gaspard Duifobrocard faiseur de luth’ (Honorable man Gaspard Duifobrocard, maker of lutes).Footnote ⁶⁹ Dell’Abbate completed the fresco that depicts two musicians playing large violes on the wall behind the musicians’ gallery (Figure 2) at Fontainebleau between 1552 and 1556, after Duiffoprugcar had relocated to France and probably after he had produced instruments for the French court.

Henri II issued ‘Lettres de naturalité pour Gaspard Dieffenbruger’ (Naturalisation papers for Gaspard Dieffenbruger) from Paris in January 1558 thereby making Duiffoprugcar a French subject. The ‘Lettres de naturalité’ begin:

Henri II, the second son and successor of François I, referring to him as ‘dear and well-beloved’ suggests a royal connection to the Duiffoprugcar workshop and approbation of Duiffoprugcar’s talents as a luthier.Footnote ⁷¹ The archival evidence therefore suggests that perhaps Henri II rather than François I spurred Duiffoprugcar’s relocation.

Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey engraved a portrait of Duiffoprugcar in 1565 (Figure 3 Footnote ⁷² ), six years before the luthier’s death. Among the cluttered pile of string instruments depicted in his portrait is at least one five-string viol with turned-out corners – a distinctive feature of many French Renaissance viols – in the lower right of the image.Footnote ⁷³ It is possible that Duiffoprugcar became acquainted with five-string viols before he relocated to Lyon. Both German and French sources describe five-string viols, albeit with different tuning systems. In the first edition (1529) of Martin Agricola’s treatise Musica instrumentalis deudsch, he presents fretted ‘grossen Geigen’ (large fiddles) with either five or six strings tuned in fourths with a third.Footnote ⁷⁴ After multiple reprints, Agricola released an extensively revised edition of his treatise in 1545. In it he introduces the ‘grosse welsche Geigen’ (large Italian fiddles), a family of instruments with frets and four or five strings tuned in fourths with a third.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hans Gerle, in his Musica teusch (German Music), first published in 1532, likewise claims that the fretted ‘grossen Geygen’ (i.e. viols), have five or six strings tuned in fourths with a third.Footnote ⁷⁶ Gerle included a woodcut depicting both a five-string viol and a six-string viol.

Figure 3 Portrait of Gaspar Duiffoprugcar, engraved by Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey. Courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

These German tutors were all marketed to bourgeois amateur musicians, and each included intabulated polyphonic music, thereby allowing beginner musicians to play ensemble music socially without a prolonged period of study to learn to read mensural notation. In 1523 or 1524, a Bavarian merchant named Jorg Weltzell, for example, intabulated music ‘auff der Geygenn’ (on fiddles).Footnote ⁷⁷ Weltzell’s manuscript preserves intabulations in German lute tablature of songs and dances in four and five parts suitable for musicking with his bourgeois peers. The extended title of the first edition of Agricola’s treatise makes clear that he was providing instruction for amateur musicians ‘how to convert [music] according to properly founded tablature for … all kinds of instruments and strings’. Gerle’s complete title likewise suggests that publications in tablature were aimed at amateurs who could quickly get up to speed to play consort music: ‘Music in German, on the Instruments of Large and Small Fiddles as well as Lutes, Showing How it Should be Converted from a Song to Tablature, Following the Basis and Kind of Their Composition; Combined with a Secret Application and Art that Allows any Amateur or Beginner to Easily Achieve an Exceptional Mastery on the Said Instrument, if so Included Gradually through Daily Practice’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Following his introductory treatise, Gerle includes intabulations (in German lute tablature) of German Tenorlieder and Psalm settings for consorts of four viols. He responded to changing tastes of bourgeois consumers in his 1546 publication Musica und Tabulatur, this time intabulating Parisian chansons.Footnote ⁷⁹

The earliest known French tutor for the viol is Premier livre de violle contenant dix chansons avec l’introduction de l’acordes, et apliquer les doits selon la manière qu’on a acoutume de joüer, le tout de la composition de Claude Gervaise (First Book of the Viol, Containing Ten Songs with an Introduction of Tuning and Fingering According to the Way We Are Used to Playing, the Whole Composed by Claude Gervaise) from around 1547.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although no known exemplar survives, we know of some of its contents because the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composer and bibliophile Sébastien de Brossard owned a copy of the second edition. In a catalog of his extensive music library created in 1724, Brossard documented his ownership of Gervaise’s tutor, which was published by Marie Lescallopier-Attaingnant, the widow of the recently deceased Parisian music publisher Pierre Attaingnant. This ‘curious collection’ (‘recueil curieux’), to use Brossard’s term for the bound volume in his collection, began with an introduction that included instructions for tuning and fingering the viol and concluded with ten chansons first presented in French tablature and then in staff notation. Brossard’s catalog includes the following annotation for his entry for Gervaise’s Premier livre de violle: ‘All of these chansons are first presented in tablature using a, b, c, d & e for the viol, and then the subject is very well noted in music and ordinary notes. 32 folios or 64 pages’.Footnote ⁸¹ In this instance Gervaise was an innovator by publishing the first viol tablature in France and for adopting French lute tablature for his project.

Duiffoprugcar was living in Lyon when the Lyonnais composer Philibert Jambe de Fer published his Épitome musical: Des tons, sons et accordz, es voix humaines, fleustes d’Alleman, fleustes à neuf trous, violes, & violons (Musical Epitome: On Tones, Sounds, and Tunings, for Human Voices, German [transverse] Flutes, Nine-Holed Flutes [recorders], Viols & Violins) in 1556. In the chapter about ‘violes’, he asserts that it was ‘an instrument with which gentlemen, merchants and other men of virtue pass their time’.Footnote ⁸² Once again the amateur status of the instrument is affirmed. Jambe de Fer dedicated his tutor to ‘the virtuous and honorable’ (‘vertueux et honorable’) Jean Darud ‘marchant es franchises de Lyon’. Darud was from a bourgeois family of spice and linen importers and a Huguenot like Jambe de Fer.Footnote ⁸³ On two pages describing how to tune viols individually and in consorts, Jambe de Fer first provides notes on a staff and then gives fingerings (a form of tablature using numbers and lines to identify strings by name) ‘for those who do not understand musical notation’.Footnote ⁸⁴ With his shop in Lyon and a renowned family name of lute and viol builders, Duiffoprugcar would have been positioned to sell five-string viols to the bourgeois ‘men of virtue’ described by Jambe de Fer. Perhaps the viol with ornate marquetry depicted in Jambe de Fer’s treatise (Figure 4) was modeled after one of the renowned luthier’s instruments.Footnote ⁸⁵

Figure 4 Dessus de viole: Jambe de Fer, Épitome musical, first unpaginated fold-out at end. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Duiffoprugcar workshop in Lyon maintained strong ties to an Italian branch of this family of luthiers and instrument wholesalers. Due in part to the propensity of family members to name their sons after themselves and in part to an incomplete historical record, the family lineage has been the topic of much debate and confusion. The elder Ulrich (I) (Odorico, Rigo) Tieffenbrucker (d. before 1560) established an Italian branch in Venice and Bologna. Ulrich (I) had three sons: Magno (I), Ulrich (II) (Odorico, Rigo) and Jacob.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ulrich (II) Tieffenbrucker was described as a ‘liuter’ (luthier) in a 1567 document and had an instrument workshop in Venice called ‘all’Albero verde’ (The Green Tree). Magno (I) had a workshop named ‘all’Aquila negra’ (The Black Eagle) in Venice and produced three sons: Magno (II), Moisé and Abraam. After the death of Magno (I), his two sons Magno (II) and Moisé ran the Black Eagle workshop.

The two brothers bought Abraam out of the family business because he seems to have been as poorly suited to handling his personal finances as he was talented at attracting legal trouble. Although all three brothers were accused of Lutheran heresy by a servant in 1565, they were not subjected to any consequences at that time. Abraam, however, was again accused of Lutheran heresy by the Inquisition in 1575, and witnesses stated that he travelled regularly to ‘French lands’ carrying several hundred ducats worth of lutes. This time Abraam was accused by the family of the painter Domenico Misani of marrying and abandoning Misani’s daughter. He appears to have gone into hiding, and a Father Inquisitor charged with locating Abraam corresponded to the court of Venice in a letter about the matter:

Relying on this letter and other documentary evidence, Stefano Pio has argued that Abraam was using the false identity of Simonetto, which he appropriated from a deceased trader of lutes known as Simone of Vicenza or Simone Cerdonis. While living, Simone was both a commercial partner and a friend of the Tieffenbrucker family. In 1545 Magno (I) had purchased land near Vicenza through Simone Rossi, whose was referred to as a ‘suonatore’ (player).Footnote ⁸⁸ According to Pio’s argument, then, Simonetto/Abraam was avoiding Venice by exporting lutes by land routes from Vincenza to Lyon, where he had family connections through his uncle Gaspard’s shop, by traveling through Padua. Although Gaspard Duiffoprugcar had died in Lyon in 1570/1, his son Johann (Jean) continued to operate the workshop from his father’s death until at least 1585.Footnote ⁸⁹ Another of Gaspard’s sons, also named Gaspard, moved to Paris upon the death of his father, married the sister of the Parisian instrument maker Jacques Delamotte and established a workshop on the rue Pot-de-Feu. If the two branches of the family maintained a working relationship, then it is probable that the Duiffoprugcars living in France imported instruments or wholesale parts from their relatives in northern Italy and sold them in their shops.Footnote ⁹⁰ A document from 1580 demonstrates that Claude Denis, the Parisian instrument builder and dealer discussed above, had ordered 200 lutes from Padua from a ‘Symon de Lus’ in Lyon.Footnote ⁹¹ ‘Symon de Lus’ was probably the same Simonetto/Abraam who made a living selling wholesale lutes from his family in northern Italy to various French instrument shops. Seven years later, at the time of his death, Claude Denis still had 35 lutes from Padua, 14 lutes from Lyon and 9 lutes from Venice in his inventory. When his son Robert died two years later, his shop’s inventory included an ‘old lute’ from ‘old Gaspartt’.Footnote ⁹²

Pio has further discovered two Brescian documents indicating that Simonetto/Abraam, while en route from Vicenza to Lyon, stopped in Brescia to purchase bowed string instruments from Gasparo da Salò. Both documents identify Simone dal Liuto as purchaser of two violins from Gasparo da Salò in 1580, five years after the letter between the Inquisitor and the court of Venice.Footnote ⁹³ Gasparo da Salò further lamented in 1588 that ‘my business does not go to France as usual’ (‘per non andar l’arte mia nella Franza secundo il solito’) suggesting that the death of Simone dal Liuto around 1580 interrupted this trade route of instruments between Brescia and France.Footnote ⁹⁴ If it is true that Abraam Tieffenbrucker, in hiding from the Inquisition, adopted the name of his deceased lute-playing friend Simone dal Liuto, and if it is true that Abraam was the purchaser of bowed string instruments from the shop of Gasparo da Salò, then it is likely that Gaspard Duiffoprugcar (and after his death, his sons) sold Venetian lutes and Brescian bowed instruments in France. Comparing appraised values for northern Italian instruments to domestic instruments in dealer inventories suggests that northern Italian stringed instruments were prized in sixteenth-century France, especially lutes from Venice and bowed instruments from Brescia.

While many lutes attributed to the Tieffenbrucker family survive, only three viols attributed to Gaspard Duiffoprugcar have survived, and all three have been discredited as fraudulent. One of these instruments is known as the ‘Plan de Paris’ (‘Map of Paris’) viol, which is today part of the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Brussels. The luthier and restorer Shem Mackey has offered convincing evidence that ‘the shape and construction details of this viol place it firmly in the second half of the 1600s and within the French/English style of making’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The two other viols attributed to Duiffoprugcar also both have similar elaborate ornamentation and are likewise misattributed. The ‘Plan de Paris’ viol includes a handwritten inscription inside the back: ‘This viola da gamba, made by Duiffoprugcar in Paris in 1515, belonged to François I. From the Dictionnaire of Choron and Fayolle. 1830’ followed by the signature of the nineteenth-century French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.Footnote ⁹⁶ The inscription in pencil is difficult to read today, and Mackey relies on an exhibition catalog, in which the last part of the inscription was plainly misread. It became fashionable in the nineteenth century for French luthiers like Vuillaume to put false labels in violins reading ‘Gaspard Duiffoprugcar’; some luthiers even carved a scroll in his likeness based on the bearded engraving produced in the sixteenth century. French scholars also contributed to the construction of Duiffoprugcar’s legend: ‘a totally fantasist biography was built up, amplified, repeated, watered down’.Footnote ⁹⁷ While no viols survive from Duiffoprugcar’s hand, he became a symbol of French nationalism in the nineteenth century, a tumultuous century when some in France gazed backwards to the Ancien Régime as a source of stability and patriotic pride.

An Instrument of Virtue: Viol Education to Train Bodies and Souls

Because by the early sixteenth century viols and the lutes emerged as instruments suitable for nobles to perform for their leisure, educational programs for princes included instruction on how to read mensural notation, sing, and perform on these instruments. Castiglione connects these two instruments in the Cortegiano. He advises courtiers that ‘Singing extempore polyphony … seems to me a beautiful kind of music …, but singing to the lute is even better’ because it is easier to understand the words. He then continues to note that ‘no less delectable is the music of four bowed viols, for it is very sweet and artificial’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The iconographic record from the sixteenth century supports Castiglione’s claim; plucked and bowed instruments are depicted performing together at affairs of the French court.

But more than instruments signifying leisure and refinement, learning to play lutes and viols persisted as part of the education of princes and their urban emulators because of the belief that these instruments held the power to balance a soul by mirroring ratios present in musica mundana, or the harmony of the spheres.Footnote ⁹⁹ By reproducing the proportions of the movements of celestial bodies through audible music (musica instrumentalis, or terrestrial music created by voices or instruments), noble musicking, according to the Neoplatonic philosophy in vogue by the middle of the sixteenth century, could mould princes to live a moral life and to rule through the equitable dispensation of justice. The relationship between audible and celestial music was also mediated through musica humana, or the internal harmony of the human body, which regulated the body–soul relationship. The proportions reflected in this threefold system could therefore shape princes into just rulers, heal the body and soul and mystically bind the earthly realm to the spiritual. Through a Pythagorean and Neoplatonic lens, music, in short, connected the incomprehensible beauty of God to human flesh by linking the carnal to the soul and the soul to the universe. By playing divinely attuned music, nobles were mirroring divine perfection.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Académie de poésie et de musique, founded in 1570 by the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf and the musician Joachim Thibault de Courville, pursued a humanistic revival of Greek and Roman poetry and music to unlock their combined power.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By composing French poetry using ancient poetic metres (vers mesurés à l’antique) and setting this measured poetry to measured music (musique mesurée à l’antique), Baïf and his collaborators believed they could induce a structured social order that was moral and just. The profound power of music, they argued, would serve the beleaguered French crown in creating a revitalised and more harmonious France to prop up a monarch weakened by recent outbreaks of confessional violence.

One enduring legacy of Baïf’s Académie stems from its influence on the Balet comique de la Royne, an elaborate court spectacle performed at the Hôtel de Bourbon in 1581.Footnote ¹⁰² Created under the auspices of Queen Catherine de Médicis, the ballet featured Baïfian measured music and dances tracing geometric shapes regulated to the ratios of celestial harmony. On one side of the hall stood the voûte dorée, an elongated wooden vault concealed by radiant billowing clouds gilded with stars. Inside the clouds ten concerts de musique (combinations of instrumentalists and vocalists) echoed the musique mesurée performed in the spectacle. Although the composition of these ensembles remains elusive, on the basis of court records of instruments available in royal musical establishments and iconographic depictions of suitable celestial instruments, viols could have been included. In the program, Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx, a violinist and the author of the text, describes the voûte dorée as representing the ‘true harmony of heaven by which all things that exist are preserved and maintained’.Footnote ¹⁰³ The geometric figures of the dances combined with the voûte dorée echoing the musique mesurée of the singers unlocked, for the ballet’s creators and its informed spectators, music’s ability to shape moral and spiritual life at court, which reverberated throughout the realm.

The plot of the Balet comique is concerned with the establishment of the harmony and order of the soul. It unfolds through the presentation of a series of mythological characters with musical powers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ During the first intermède, a Triton and three Sirens – known for the alluring power of voices – enter through one of the trellised arches and perform a song in musique mesurée in praise of King Henry III. The musicians in the voûte dorée respond to each couplet with a refrain, symbolising sympathetic resonance with the heavens. The queen and her ladies-in-waiting next enter on a cart decorated as a giant fountain drawn by two sea horses and accompanied by eight of the king’s musicians dressed as Tritons, who sing in praise of the queen (Figure 5). According to the image in the printed program, the tritons self-accompanied their song with a viol, lute, harp and trumpet. While the viol and lute are instruments that signified aristocratic leisure and harmonic proportions, the harp (played by King David, the composer of the Psalms) and trumpet (played by celestial choirs of angels) represent biblical musical power. The divine power of music in both ancient Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions are thus melded in a single vignette.

Figure 5 ‘Figure des Tritons’: Beaujoyeulx, Balet comique de la Royne, fol. 16^v. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Painted nearly three decades before the performance of the Balet comique de la Royne, the fresco behind the musicians’ gallery in the Salle de Bal at the Château de Fontainebleau (Figure 2 above) also depicts viols as instruments with cosmic symbolism. As analysed by Anne-Marie Lecoq and Luisa Capodieci, the doorway ruptures the space into contrasting halves with distinct groups of musicians.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the left, according to Capodieci, the concert takes place in a clearing protected by an enclosure of rocks and massive trees reminiscent of Parnassus.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In support of this reading, multiple drawn and engraved copies of this half of the fresco bear the title ‘Concert of the Gods’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Lecoq argues that the left half of the fresco should be read as a celebration of love and celestial harmony. She highlights Amor, Venus and the Graces dancing in a circle, which represents the Platonic concept of love serving as the current that animates the cosmos and binds the soul of man to God. The female and male viol players, cloaked in classical drapery, gaze tenderly into each other’s eyes while seated in a hierarchically superior position on a platform, which, argues Capodieci, mirrors the placement of the king on a raised platform at the opposite end of the ballroom.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the other half of the fresco, four beautiful young ladies assemble around a musician playing a lute and a faun playing a tambourine. Lecoq argues that this half of the fresco represents worldly music as a foil to celestial harmony. This concert appears at a lower visual plane than the transmundane viol players, and the king’s musicians performing from the balcony would appear lower still to the vantage point of the spectators in the hall. My own Neoplatonic reading of the fresco would rework and expand Lecoq’s interpretation with musica mundana represented by the concert of the gods on the left, musica humana depicted in the humans and faun on the right, and, I would add, musica instrumentalis present in the sounds produced by the terrestrial musicians performing in front of the fresco. This interpretation resonates with the overarching mythological plan of the other frescos around the ballroom, which Lecoq reads as the balance between concord and discord.

Understanding that celestial harmony could forge the philosopher king into a just and equitable ruler, harnessing its power could heal a kingdom divided by confessional violence. The bowed viol, in this iconological reading, symbolised cosmic order and the power of terrestrial music to both mirror and tap into the divine beauty of the heavens. Performing terrestrial music and understanding its proportions were the mechanisms through which humans could contemplate the divine. The ballroom was therefore not merely a space for royal entertainment but also a portal between realms, with the royal musicians taking an active part in enacting elaborate ceremonies of cosmic order.

Because learning to play the viol and the lute came to signify good manners and education, artisans, merchants and anyone with aspirations to be perceived as a person of quality pursued a basic musical education. In 1546, the city of Marseille subsidised a school founded by the luthier Barthelemé de la Crous to teach the young children of the city ‘viols, lutes and other instruments’. To convince the city leaders of the value of his endeavor, De la Crous crafted a moral argument. He suggested that if the children devoted their energies to learning the science of instruments such as viols and lutes, they would not have idle time and would stay away from vice.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Playing music, especially on the viol and lute, was a suitable way to pass their leisure time. By January 1548, only two years after the school opened in Marseille, viol players had dethroned the local minstrels, who were forced to earn their keep by dispersing to neighboring villages.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gervaise published his Premier livre de violle in Paris around 1547, and Jambe de Fer published his Épitome musical in Lyon in 1556, both of which targeted bourgeois amateurs by offering guidance on issues such as tuning, holding the instrument and fingering, and Gervais included intabulated chansons to facilitate the performance of four-part polyphony. Some with the financial means could also contract for private instruction. On 6 September 1555, Michel Dales, a Parisian musician living in the rue Charretière near the Hôtel de Coqueret in the house called the Green Trellis, entered into a contract with Pierre Nepveu, instructor at the university, living in the rue Saint-Nicolas-de-Chardonneret. For a payment of 12 livres, Dales agrees to teach Nepveu to sing from musical notation and play the viol in his home for one hour every day beginning on 7 September for a period of four months.Footnote ¹¹¹ Whether through formal schooling or private lessons, the bourgeoisie had access to musical instruction for their children. The rapid acceleration of printed material targeting amateur musicians suggests that many, Catholics and Huguenots alike, availed themselves of the opportunity to emulate the nobility. That the language of Neoplatonism was legible to the bourgeoisie is demonstrated by Jambe de Fer’s dedication to his Épitome musical, in which he wishes to the merchant dedicatees, ‘God keep you both and yours in continual good friendship, concord and the consonant harmony of your virtuous affections.’

One rare example of a sixteenth-century French image portraying a consort of viols performing together – as opposed to the mixed consorts featuring one or two viols more commonly found in contemporary iconography – originates from a moral, spiritual, and pedagogical initiative. In the eleventh and last of a series of drawings depicting his Maison de la Charité chrétienne (House of Christian Charity), the Parisian apothecary Nicolas Houël exhibits a school of music (Figure 6).Footnote ¹¹² In the right foreground four students play large five-string viols while reading from published part books like those of Parisian chansons produced by the Attaingnant firm. This image demonstrates the connection between musical recreation and morality for ‘men of virtue’.

Figure 6 School of music: Houël, ‘Procession de Louise de Lorraine’, drawing 11. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Houël envisioned his Maison de la Charité chrétienne as a charitable foundation that would provide ‘education in the profession of apothecary … for the instruction of poor orphan children and for the shameful poor, priests, schoolboys, gentleman, merchants and artisans of the city and suburbs of Paris’. The boys would be charged with maintaining a medicinal botanical garden and with dispensing the medicine they grew to the urban poor of Paris.Footnote ¹¹³ As Houël envisioned the curriculum, boys would ground their education on a humanistic foundation in languages and letters. The Maison, with financial support from the crown and wealthy bourgeois Parisians, would order social relations and provide the destitute with opportunity to learn a trade.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In return for royal support Houël’s institution would serve as the spiritual home for the Queen’s soul.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Houël was part of a growing number of Catholics who grew weary from decades of the Wars of Religion and turned to the doctrine of ‘good works’ and charity as a means to demonstrate Christian values while supporting those ‘faithful Christians’ who suffered ‘the dangerous and pernicious effects of civil wars’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Council of Trent had recently affirmed the practice of seeking salvation through charity and other good works as official Counter-Reformation church doctrine.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Charity was a means to counter the aggression and violence of the religious wars, and it was also seen as an effective weapon wielded against Huguenot heresy. Jean Martin, the governor of Paris’s Grand Bureau des Pauvres, made the same point in his 1580 treatise when he claimed that ‘almsgiving keeps and battles like a strong spear against our enemy’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Charity was therefore central to Counter-Reformation Catholic theology and was a necessary response to the countless orphans created by decades of bloody violence.

Besides housing and educating orphans, growing medicinal botanicals and administering medicine to Paris’ poor, Houël emphasised the establishment of a chapel where divine service would be conducted for the health and prosperity of the Maison’s royal patrons. The chapel would have four chaplains who are ‘learned men and well versed in good letters’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ These chaplains would take some of the children to serve the chapel and learn music and plainchant, while others would study the art and science of apothecary in order to treat the sick poor in their homes.Footnote ¹²⁰ Some of the children would therefore repay the financial support of the royal family by singing and praying for them in the chapel. As part of their training, they would learn to read music, which in their leisure hours could be applied to performances of music on viols, lutes and other instruments played by ‘gentlemen, merchants and other men of virtue’. The viol, like the lute, was therefore propagated from aristocratic circles to aspirational bourgeois amateurs down to well-born but impoverished orphans who were trained in a craft and provided an opportunity for a respectable future. Even if Houël’s ‘Escole de Musique’ never became a reality, the chapel was created as a crucial component of his spiritual project. Civic and religious leaders at the Maison and other charitable organisations saw performing on the viol and lute as part of moral and spiritual project to reduce idle time of youths and focus their energy on training and uplifting their bodies and souls with activities that kept them away from vice.