Artificial Dolphins, heavenly spheres and Catherine de Medici taking her tween King son on a royal tour of the land to the sounds of Amati violins, this episode has it all. Step into the opulent world of 16th-century France as we uncover the captivating story of the court of Catherine de Medici and a set of royal violins commissioned for her son, Charles IX by the violin maker Andrea Amati. In this podcast, we embark on a journey through the rich cultural tapestry of the Medici dynasty and their influence on the arts. Delve into the fascinating intersection of music, power, and intrigue within the court, where the resplendent sounds of violins played a pivotal role in shaping the Renaissance era. Music heard in this podcast is as follows. Aco home casts - Timo-Veikko Valve Bloom – Roo Walker Make believe – Giulio Fazio Banquet of Squires – Jonny Easton ACO Home the Home – Liisa Pallandi and Timo- Viekko Valve Sonata representative Unfamiliar faces – All good folks Industrial music box – Kevin Macleod Transcript After the demigod Hercules had accomplished his eleventh labour, giving himself a five-finger discount to Zeus golden apples, he stopped to rest on the banks of the Po River. In those times, however, the area was overridden with thieving giants who plundered the small villages in the surrounding countryside. Learning of the hero's mini break in the area, the elders of the villages approached Hercules and implored him to help rid them of the giants. When they said help, they really meant, you know, if he could do it. Ever ready for a bout of fisticuffs, in no time at all, our demigod was able to kill all the offending giants and free the region from their reign of terror. The overjoyed inhabitants wanted to reward Hercules by giving him their most precious possessions. However, Hercules decided that what these people needed was a place where they could protect themselves in case new brigands arrived. He couldn't stick around, he had heroing to do. So he founded a fortified city and gave it the name of his mother, El Camino, which later turned into Cremona, meaning mighty. And this is the Renaissance take on why the city is called Cremona. Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history In the previous episodes of the Violin Chronicles, we saw Andrea Amati setting up his workshop, the life of the city, how it was run, and the movement of humanism, its effects on education, and finally the reformation, the influence the church had on people's lives, especially those of the artisan class. Andrea Amati's workshop had been up and running for about 10 years when news came that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, would be visiting the city in August. It was all anyone could talk about. They were going to erect a triumphal arch, there would be celebrations, feasting, and of course, music. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the ruler. The excitement was palpable. Andrea Amati, his wife, and their son, the little five year old Antonio Amati, would have been in the crowd that came out to catch a glimpse of the emperor passing through Cremona. But now Andrea is fulfilling a royal order. The violin is having a coming-of-age moment and starting to be fashionable to the point that the trend setting French royal court is making orders for Cremonese violins. And so it begins. What violin maker out there is unfamiliar with the phrase I'm looking for a cremonese instrument. Join me as we look at the fashionistas who set the ball rolling. Every city wants to look their best if the Holy Roman Emperor passes through. They were still working on containing heretics, and questions still abounded on how the church would approach things such as music. Groups of thinkers or academies were popping up all over Renaissance Italy and ideas about the nature of music, its purpose and power were being discussed. So I was, there was sort of like scientific things happening, right? You had Galileo and everything. And, and my, my thought processes, the music, I felt like they. There were like music texts where they say, you know, it's, it kind of moves your soul. It has this physical impact. And I was thinking, it's not so strange that they would approach music in the scientific way, but in the same way as like, Oh, well, you've got gravity, you've got the stars and music. We can feel, we can actually physically feel something when we hear music. So we may as well treat it almost like a science. It's, they're doing all these sciences, like why not music? And it's overlapped into the religious sphere as well because it had to do with your, your soul and your inner being sort of thing. I'm John Gagné. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the university of Sydney and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries. So I suppose the first thing to say about that is that the ancients had a strong mathematical sense of music. You know, Pythagoras's theory was that, you know, you remember that the parable of the reeds and you cut reeds to a certain length and they make a certain tone if you blow through the top of the reed and I think the mathematical, I forget the mathematical, formula, but it's sort of like the length of a, of a string is inversely proportional to the sound that it makes. And so that was established in antiquity, but became increasingly of interest. I mean, people had known about that for centuries through the Middle Ages, but you know, with the advancement of certain techniques, interest returns to let's say the mathematical qualities of music. There was a huge tradition to draw upon. I mean, one of the examples is something like St. Augustine, who was writing in late antiquity, who wrote a treatise on mathematics, but it was all about music. So they were always kind of intertwined. Maybe the best case study to think about is the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who lived around the same time as Galileo, slightly earlier, and was very interested in this Pythagorean theory of music and arithmetic, he was one of the proponents of the idea of the music of the spheres. Which has an interesting core idea, which is that if we think of proportion of distance, it can be the string of an instrument, but it could also be the distance between two planets, or three planets, or four planets. And so the idea was that we could, if we could imagine reeds and strings having a relationship of mathematical sound to you know, within the mathematical system, then why could we not also imagine the distance between the planets having the same kind of relationship, and that was an elaboration of a pre-existing idea that the spheres, that there were spheres in which all of the planets of the galaxy moved, and that they produced, therefore, a sound, which was not, let's say, a real sound, but resonated with your soul. So that the music of the universe was a kind of naturally God established harmony in which proportion, mathematical proportions from the minuscule to the galactic made sense and resonated with the natural proportions of, you know, our soul. And that's universal harmony? Yep, and then of course, then as you said, it becomes kind of it becomes a cultural trope. People begin to play with the idea of the music of the spheres. It becomes a poetic inspiration in the 16th and 17th centuries when poets begin to use the idea of the universal harmony, the music of the spheres to write poetry about, you know, concord in general between humans, between God and man, between you know, all living beings. And so it was a very powerful idea, which I think it remains a powerful idea to think that there's something rational and proportional in the universe and that it works on, let's say, scale of sizes from the, the minuscule to the, to the most enormous. And so when you see like those Renaissance. because the violin is drawn in a very sort of Renaissance mathematical type way, would they have been sort of inspired by that idea of, is that, was that all one big thing? Definitely in terms of the mathematics, I think, you know, that's part of the, you know, when you go back to the 15th century and you look at some of the most successful artists of that period, you know, just in terms of religious art most of them, I'm thinking here of artists like the 15th century artist Piero della Francesca, Or Leonardo da Vinci who was a contemporary. They all leave sketchbooks where, you know, they've got measurements of man down to the, you know, we all know the, so-called the Trivian Man of Leonardo, which is the man with his arms outstretched his legs wide and using a circle in a square. But artists had much more complex methods. Showing the proportionality of the human body about, you know, let's say the size of the, the hand to the height of a man, or you know, the span of arms to the height. So this is basically a workshop method for most art working artists was to understand proportionality of the body, which would then could be broadcast into other media. So, for instance, what made a building pleasurable to be inside? was the fact that it corresponded to a natural portion of the human body. And so you would build buildings in, you know scales that were scaled up or down from the size of a human. You know, it's either, it's like 15 men high or something like that. So I imagine that probably when it comes to the design, the increasing complexity of the design of violins, this, there's something similar at work there, which is that artists and mathematicians already know how to think proportionally and to work out in sort of grids. I think that's the best proportion for whatever they're constructing, whether it be a building or an instrument. And I think that's probably what we see in develop
