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Instruments, collections of, §3: Renaissance to 1800
3. Renaissance to 1800.
The flourishing of instrument collections during the Renaissance, especially in Italy, is best
understood in the context of collecting in general. With increasing wealth and ease of travel,
collectors gathered great numbers of exotic objects both for amusement and instruction.
Competition led to ostentation, since according to Matarazzo ‘it belongs to the position of the great
to keep horses, dogs, … court jesters, singers and foreign animals’, and the largest number of
different specimens was most impressive. The contemporaneous development of idiomatic
instrumental music elevated the status of instrument makers, who in some towns were protected
by professional guilds. Growth of instrument families in all pitch ranges made it desirable to
obtain complete consorts, adding new varieties as they became fashionable. Fulfilling aristocratic
demands for instruments of utmost magnificence, makers produced art objects worthy of display
in private musei and Wunderkammern; an impression of these studios survives in the intarsias
that lined Federigo da Montefeltro's studios at Urbino and Gubbio. By commissioning elegant
instruments towns and churches joined the nobility and rich merchants in demonstrating
prosperity and good taste. All these factors encouraged instrument collecting.
With important exceptions noted below, most of the Renaissance and Baroque collections have
become dispersed. Some idea of their contents can be gained from various published
inventories and descriptions. A 1503 inventory of Isabella of Castile's royal alcázar reveals about
20 instruments, some old and broken, a modest assemblage used mainly in performance. A
century later Philip II's royal palace in Madrid boasted not only 136 wind, 44 string and 11
keyboard instruments, but also ten Chinese instruments (1602 inventory; the collection, part of
which Philip inherited from his aunt, Queen Mary of Hungary, was dispersed through sale a few
years later). Wind instruments likewise far outnumbered strings at Henry VIII's Westminster (1547
inventory), where Philip van Wilder had in his charge about 320 instruments (not counting gilt
horns, drums and the like), including 40 keyboards. Raymond Fugger's music chamber in
Augsburg held (in 1566) nearly 400 instruments, including over 100 flutes and recorders, about
140 lutes and many violins and harpsichords by famous makers, gathered from all over Europe.
The Berlin court orchestra owned (in 1582) 72 instruments, 60 of them wind, while Archduke
Ferdinand II of the Tyrol's collections (1596) comprised over 230 costly instruments, nearly 80%
wind. Ferdinand's personal collection, now at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, was kept at
his Ambras residence near Innsbruck. French 16th-century collections were far less impressive,
but Jean de Badonvilliers, councillor to François I, left a number of string and keyboard
instruments at his death in 1544. A 1603 inventory of the Hengrave Hall collection survives; in that
year the royal collection provided violins for Queen Elizabeth's funeral.
Woodwind instruments usually outnumbered strings in Renaissance repositories, but have not
survived in such profusion. Wooden flutes and reed instruments, being cheaper and offering less
opportunity for decoration than strings, were considered less worth preserving when they became
obsolete; they were also harder to modernize (ivory ones were more precious and often
elaborately carved, but less useful in performance; hence they survive in relatively high numbers).
Wind instruments in sets often belonged to repositories heavily drawn on by professional
performers. The Kassel Hofkapelle inventories of 1573, 1613 and 1638 record loans to the
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Instruments, collections of, §3: Renaissance to 1800
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count's musicians; there and elsewhere it appears that valuable, decorated keyboard instruments
seldom left their usual chambers (hence more harpsichords and organs occur in inventories than
one might expect since one or more might have had to be kept wherever music was often
performed). These stationary, seldom loaned instruments are more likely than most to have
become ‘collectors’ items’.
Only gradually did connoisseurs evolve the concept of a collection as a work of art, capable of
displaying internal harmony and of expressing its owner's taste. Private collectors rather than
institutional buyers were mainly responsible for developing this attitude, and Italy in particular was
full of collectors. Venice boasted Agostino Amadi, Luigi Balbi, Marco Contarini (whose collection
passed to the Correr family and parts of which came to the Paris and Brussels conservatory
collections), Leonardo Sanudo and Catarino Zeno; in Bologna lived Ferdinando Cospi; in Ferrara,
Antonio Goretti; in Florence, Ridolfo Sirigatti; in Padua, Enea degli Obizzi (whose collection is now
in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum); in Rome, Michele Todini and Athanasius Kircher; and
in Milan, Manfredo Settala. Finally, there were the more renowned d'Este, Sforza and Medici
families. According to Bottrigari, Isabella d'Este's nephew Alfonso II kept his collection in two great
chambers where his musicians played; the instruments were arranged by category, and
separated according to whether they were played or ‘different from those … usually made today’,
and included Vicentino's arcicembalo and a set of crumhorns (possibly those now in the Musée
des Instruments de Musique, Brussels).
In Spain and Portugal, noteworthy collections belonged to the Duke of Calabria at Valencia and to
Queen Mary of Hungary. Northwards were the private holdings of Jean Baptiste Dandeleu, Caspar
Duitz, Hendrick van Brederode, and Constantijn Huygens. Hans Burgkmair's Triumphzug
illustrates instruments from Maximilian I's Hofkapelle. A certain Felix Platter owned instruments in
Basle.
In 1659 Elias Ashmole received a Guinea Coast drum from Johan Tradescant the younger,
whose 1656 Musaeum Tradescantianum catalogue records several African and Indian drums
under the heading ‘Warlike Instruments’ (a Guinea drum and a fragment of a side-blown horn
remain in the Ashmolean collection, Oxford); similar instruments had been illustrated by
Praetorius (Theatrum instrumentorum, 1620). Athanasius Kircher's museum at Rome contained
instruments discussed in his Musurgia universalis (1650); and Filippo Bonanni, curator of
Kircher's collection from 1698, drew on Kircher's text as well as Marin Mersenne's Harmonie
universelle (1636–7) for his own Gabinetto armonico (1722). Michele Todini's Dichiaratione della
galleria armonica (1676) describes his own idiosyncratic collection, which included curious
instruments of his own design; his extraordinary harpsichord flanked by figures of Polyphemus
and Galatea survives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Todini exhibited his collection
publicly, and Winternitz believed that it might have constituted ‘the first museum exclusively
devoted to musical instruments’.
Of particular interest later in the Baroque era were the keyboard instruments in collections of
Cosimo III and Ferdinando de' Medici (supervised by Bartolomeo Cristofori after 1716), Cardinal
Ottoboni and Queen Maria Barbara de Braganza. In England Sir Samuel Hellier assembled a
distinguished collection in the mid-18th century including the Stradivari violin now known by his
name; the greater part, however, he sent to his country house so that his estate workers could
enjoy orchestral music-making – an early example of the provision of sets of instruments for
workers' recreation which became common with 19th-century industrialists. By that time it was
common for collectors to obtain antique instruments at public sales.
Some outstanding 18th-century musicians were collectors. The celebrated castrato Farinelli
owned several precious keyboard instruments (nicknamed ‘Coreggio’, Rafael’, ‘Titian’ and so
on), some inherited from Queen Maria Barbara; his testament (1782) specifies that his collection,
formed for playing domestic music, should be perpetually preserved in good order along with his
music library for the exclusive enjoyment of devoted musicians. Bach at his death owned 19
instruments estimated at nearly a third of the entire value of his estate. Curatorial responsibilities
may have stimulated other notable composers of instrumental music. In 1673 Henry Purcell was
apprenticed to John Hingeston, Charles II's instrument keeper, as an unpaid ‘keeper, maker,
mender, repayrer and tuner of the regalls, organs, virginalls, flutes and recorders and all other
kind of wind instruments whatsoever’; ten years later Purcell succeeded Hingeston. One of
Haydn's contractual responsibilities as Vice-Kapellmeister to the Esterházys was to look after the
instruments and order new ones for the prince's orchestra. Vivaldi's duties at the Pio Ospedale
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Copyright © Oxford University Press 2007 — 2011.
della Pietà included the purchase of instruments.
Laurence Libin, Arnold Myers
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