Florence, a sanctuary of the visual arts, was also an important hub of musical activity from the late fourteenth-century on.
The city of the Medici was a rich repository of music: Francesco Landini, “the blind organist”, wrote exquisite works in the dolce stile of the Ars Nova, and a few decades later the Burgundian Dufay gave himself up to his passion for Italy and in 1436 celebrated the consecration of Brunelleschi’s cathedral with the motet Nuper Rosarum Flores.
The organist Squarcialupi carried on a friendly correspondence with Dufay, and the poet Angelo Poliziano may have written his poem Favola d’Orfeo – a surprising premonition of what Monteverdi would later do – for Isabella d’Este in Mantua at the end of the fifteenth-century. |
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