PETRUCCI B-06 HAAR 6-04-2005 11:16 Pagina 155
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PETRUCCI B-06 HAAR 6-04-2005 11:16 Pagina 155 JAMES HAAR PETRUCCI AS BOOKMAN In an article full of perceptive observations on Petrucci’s work, Claudio Gallico points out that all of the printer’s musical output, whether of sacred or secular content, was practical in concept and unassuming in appearance, despite the much – and perhaps exaggeratedly – admired symmetry and beauty of his notational typeface.1 Petrucci had, at least during his years of activity in his native Fossombrone, the typographical resources to print volumes of verbal text, but he did not publish works of humanist or theoretical musical content. Nor did he attempt to produce musical books of an appearance to challenge formally written and attractively decorated manuscripts, choirbooks like Antico’s Liber quindecim missarum of 1516; when compared with deluxe manuscripts Petrucci’s books are like graphic reproductions of paintings.2 Gallico’s apt observation does not reduce Petrucci to the level of workaday printer; his volumes are too carefully done and too attractive for that. It would seem to preclude him from being considered a scholar-publisher, a bookman worthy of the company of great figures such as Aldo Manuzio. I do not propose to make a scholar, a musical humanist, of Ottaviano de’ Petrucci; but I will maintain that he observed and admired the cultural milieu of the publishing world of Venice, and that his books earned him, as he intended, status and respect in that world. Although Petrucci and his musical advisers and editors, chief among them Pietro da Castello,3 must have had a plan of publication in mind by the time he applied for a printing privilege from the Venetian Signoria in May of 1498, Petrucci says in it only that he plans to print canto figurado. His mention of canto fermo and even of organ and lute 1 CLAUDIO GALLICO, “Dal laboratorio di Ottaviano Petrucci: immagine, trasmissione e cultura della musica,” Rivista italiana di musicologia XVIII (1982), 187-206 at 196. 2 GALLICO, “Dal laboratorio,” 196, uses the analogy of graphic art-music printing, without comparing paintings to elaborate musical manuscripts. 3 I believe that Petrucci had some musical training, though no proof for this has yet emerged. On the identity of Pietro da Castello [Petrus Castellanus] and his importance as Petrucci’s collaborator-editor, see BONNIE J. BLACKBURN, “Petrucci’s Musical Editor: Petrus Castellanus and his Musical Garden,” Musica Disciplina XLIX (1995), 15-45. - 155 - PETRUCCI B-06 HAAR 6-04-2005 11:16 Pagina 156 JAMES HAAR tablature may not indicate immediate repertorial plan so much as claim for a monopoly over all music printing in Venice, including adaptations of his basic technical novelty, typeface for a variety of musical symbols. In a Venice which, Petrucci says, “encourages and excites men of intellect to devise new inventions every day, things which make for public convenience and ornament,”4 he has found, after much work and much expense, something many within and outside Italy had searched for, a workable means of printing polyphonic music. Printers in the closing years of the fifteenth century did indeed apply for privileges to print in a variety of languages and non-verbal symbols. Petrucci’s application is very reminiscent of that of Aldo Manuzio applying for a privilege to print his new Greek cursive font, submitted in February, 1495.5 Petrucci was doubtless the “inventor” of his musical typography in that he coordinated its various elements into a usable and indeed highly presentable blend. Whether he worked in his, or another printer’s shop – as proofreader, perhaps as compositor – we do not know; but there is no reason to think that he cast or even, in a technical sense, designed the type for which he is famous. Mary Kay Duggan’s attractive hypothesis is that Jacomo Ungaro (or Todesco), a man known to have had a long career in Venice as a typecutter, was Petrucci’s typecaster and indeed the owner of the punches and matrices for the music font, perhaps retaining some of these when Petrucci left for Fossombrone.6 Jacomo himself applied for a Venetian privilege in September of 1513, stating that, having found the way to print canto figurato, he wished to prevent others from using the fruit of his labors.7 He does not say, and according to Duggan did not mean, that he wished to print music himself; but he evidently concluded that Petrucci was not going to return to Venice.8 Duggan further notes that Petrucci’s mensural types resemble those used in Francesco Niger’s Grammatica (Venice, 1480), a book containing the first known printed examples of mensural music.9 If Ungaro, who was in Venice before 1480, made this early type he must have been known as a music typecutter when Petrucci first arrived in Venice; and if he made the typeface used by Petrucci, its slightly old-fashioned appearance would be satisfactorily explained. Finally, Ungaro was known to Aldo Manuzio, had perhaps worked for him, and is mentioned in Aldo’s first will, dated March, 1506, as 4 “vostra serenità cum sue concessioni et privilegi invitar et excitar gli Inzegni ad excogitar ogni dì novi Inventioni, qual habitano essere a commodità, et ornamento pubblico.” For the complete text of Petrucci’s application see CLAUDIO SARTORI, Bibliografia delle opere musicali stampate da Ottaviano Petrucci (Florence: Olschki, 1948), 14-15. 5 See MARTIN DAVIES, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (London: The British Museum, 1995), 18-20. On petitions of the 1490s dealing with maps and various non-European languages, see HORATIO F. BROWN, The Venetian Printing Press, 1469-1800 (London, 1891; repr. Amsterdam: van Heusden, 1969), 41-43. Brown dates Aldo’s petition February, 1496. 6 MARY KAY DUGGAN, Italian Music Incunabula (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 38, 40. 7 DUGGAN, Italian Music Incunabula, 39, 301 (text of the petition). 8 In June, 1514, Petrucci applied, through his financial backers Amadeo Scotto and Nicolo di Raffaele, to renew his own Venetian privilege. DUGGAN, Italian Music Incunabula, 39, says that Ongaro may have died by this time. 9 DUGGAN, Italian Music Incunabula, 99-101. - 156 - PETRUCCI B-06 HAAR 6-04-2005 11:16 Pagina 157 PETRUCCI AS BOOKMAN “compatre” and “gettator di lettere.”10 Many printers of the time applied for a privilege just as they were about to begin, or had already begun, production of a book. Why it took Petrucci three years to come out with his first volume is a matter for speculation; perhaps the “aliquot abortus” referred to in Bartolomeo Budrio’s dedicatory letter in the Odhecaton refers to failed attempts by Petrucci himself (in his own letter Petrucci mentions failures of others, unnamed “ingeniosissimos viros”).11 There was of course much work to be done. If, as I think, preliminary decisions had been reached on what was to be published in the first few years, not all of this music may have been in what Budrio calls the overflowing seminarium of Petrus Castellanus; and even if it was, it had to be edited and readied for printing. There were a number of decisions to be made about size and format, verbal text and initials, layout on the page. I will turn to these presently. One thing Petrucci decided early: the name he was to go by. In Fossombrone, to judge from surviving documents which mention him, he was usually referred to as “Octavius”, though there are a few occurrences of the grander “Octavianus.”12 In his career as a printer he is always “Octavianus.” Perhaps the names were nearly interchangeable. But if we consider Petrucci’s choice of a marca for his Venetian editions, the patriarchal cross above and intersecting a heart-shaped figure with the initials O. P. F. (Octavianus Petrutius Forosemproniensis), this device is quite close to that of Ottaviano Scotto of Monza (d. 1498), patriarch of the Scotto publishing clan and uncle of one of Petrucci’s financial backers, Amadeo Scotto.13 Scotto’s device is, like that of a number of Venetian printers in the closing years of the fifteenth century, modeled on that of the greatly admired Nicolas Jenson.14 It would thus seem that 10 DUGGAN, Italian Music Incunabula, 38, 299 (text of the will). Ongaro is not mentioned in Aldo’s second will, dated January, 1515. 11 The dedicatory letters in the Odhecaton are published in various places, including SARTORI, Bibliografia, 34-35. A careful transcription, accompanied by an English translation (the work of Leofranc Holford-Strevens), may be found in BONNIE J. BLACKBURN, “Lorenzo de’ Medici, a lost Isaac Manuscript, and the Venetian Ambassador,” Musica Franca. Essays in Honor of Frank A. D’Accone, eds. Irene Alm, Alyson McLamore, and Colleen Reardon (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1996), 19-44, 33-35, 42-44. 12 See the various Fossombrone documents mentioning Petrucci cited in AUGUSTO VERNARECCI, Ottaviano de’ Petrucci da Fossombrone (Fossombrone: F. Monacelli, 1881; 2d ed., Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1882), chapters 6-9, passim. 13 Ottaviano Scotto was a publisher who hired printers to execute his books. Typical colophons of his volumes are two (1492, 1497) devoted to Quaestiones subtilissime of Albertus de Saxonia on works of Aristotle (De celo et mundo, Libri analectorum posteriorum), specifying that “Bonatus Locatellus Bergomensis” printed them at the expense of the “nobilis viri Octaviani Scoti civis modoetiensis.” 14 For examples of Scotto’s marca see GIUSEPPINA ZAPPELLA, Le marche dei tipografi e degli editori italiani del Cinquecento, 2 vols. (Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 1986), no. LIII (cerchio e croce), figs. 272-73. Petrucci’s device is given under no. lxxiv (cuore), fig. 427. Both Scotto and Petrucci use the patriarchal double- armed cross.