Palazzo Ducale and Claudio Monteverdi
31 May 2013
Mantova, Italia
During our guided tour of the Palazzo Ducale I learned that I was not correct about the number of rooms it contains. It has five hundred rooms. It is a city unto itself. Imagine the management of such a place. Heating and lighting and bathing and cooking and dusting and furnishing and staffing and financing. We hear all the time about oligarchs and billionaires, but I doubt any of them have a residence with five hundred rooms.
In it's day, the Palazzo Ducale housed eight hundred people. It's day was approximately from the year thirteen hundred to the year seventeen hundred and seven.
The Gonzaga's were farmers of no significance until they came to power in a coup d'etat in 1300. They slaughtered the city leaders (the Bonacolsi family) and took over their houses and palazzos, and exiled the leaders of the losers to a tower where they were abandoned for a two hundred year stay; shackled in irons, in a room, alone, with the doors and windows sealed over.
After their brutal beginning, the Gonzagas became patrons of the arts and made Mantua into a renaissance mecca. The Gonzagas patronized Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Claudio Monteverdi.
Today, their palazzo has few traces of their existence. In the year seventeen hundred and seven--after a lack of male heirs and several missteps--the Gonzagas fell from permanently from power. And Mantua passed through French, Austrian and Napoleonic hands. By the year eighteen-hundred everything of value was gone except the building.
*******************
Exactly one year ago Mantua was shaken by an earthquake and the most important room of the Palazzo Ducale has since then been closed. The room is called the Camera degli Sposi (chamber of the newlyweds) and contains frescoes, five centuries old, by Andrea Mantegna that depict important events in the life of the Gonzagas.
We were not able to see that room. Instead we were snuck into a recently discovered room. A room that centuries ago was walled over. It was known that something was behind the wall, but it was not opened up until the year nineteen-hundred and ninety-eight. The room was where every Friday night for ten years--four hundred years ago--Claudio Monteverdi entertained the Gonzagas with his new compositions.
At one time vocal music was basically poetry set to music. Simple music with one vocal line and one slender accompaniment. Monteverdi imagined a larger form where the text could tell about people: what they experience, what makes them good or bad, how it feels to be in love, what effect does power have on them. Simply put, Monteverdi invented opera. And he did it in Mantua on the Gonzagas nickel.
Lorenzo Bonoldi, our outstanding guide, arranged for us to visit the otherwise unavailable music room where Monteverdi played. The room is just raw space, unrestored, somewhat crude, a little dusty. It's a mid-size room. Somewhat rectangular but with a triangle of walls projecting into the center. It used to have an unusual ceiling like an umbrella and in the arcs where the umbrella meets the wall there were a semi-circle frescoes which are still visible. If those walls could talk.
Marlow and Wes
31 May 2013
Mantova, Italia
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Mantova, Italia
During our guided tour of the Palazzo Ducale I learned that I was not correct about the number of rooms it contains. It has five hundred rooms. It is a city unto itself. Imagine the management of such a place. Heating and lighting and bathing and cooking and dusting and furnishing and staffing and financing. We hear all the time about oligarchs and billionaires, but I doubt any of them have a residence with five hundred rooms.
In it's day, the Palazzo Ducale housed eight hundred people. It's day was approximately from the year thirteen hundred to the year seventeen hundred and seven.
The Gonzaga's were farmers of no significance until they came to power in a coup d'etat in 1300. They slaughtered the city leaders (the Bonacolsi family) and took over their houses and palazzos, and exiled the leaders of the losers to a tower where they were abandoned for a two hundred year stay; shackled in irons, in a room, alone, with the doors and windows sealed over.
After their brutal beginning, the Gonzagas became patrons of the arts and made Mantua into a renaissance mecca. The Gonzagas patronized Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Claudio Monteverdi.
Today, their palazzo has few traces of their existence. In the year seventeen hundred and seven--after a lack of male heirs and several missteps--the Gonzagas fell from permanently from power. And Mantua passed through French, Austrian and Napoleonic hands. By the year eighteen-hundred everything of value was gone except the building.
*******************
Exactly one year ago Mantua was shaken by an earthquake and the most important room of the Palazzo Ducale has since then been closed. The room is called the Camera degli Sposi (chamber of the newlyweds) and contains frescoes, five centuries old, by Andrea Mantegna that depict important events in the life of the Gonzagas.
We were not able to see that room. Instead we were snuck into a recently discovered room. A room that centuries ago was walled over. It was known that something was behind the wall, but it was not opened up until the year nineteen-hundred and ninety-eight. The room was where every Friday night for ten years--four hundred years ago--Claudio Monteverdi entertained the Gonzagas with his new compositions.
At one time vocal music was basically poetry set to music. Simple music with one vocal line and one slender accompaniment. Monteverdi imagined a larger form where the text could tell about people: what they experience, what makes them good or bad, how it feels to be in love, what effect does power have on them. Simply put, Monteverdi invented opera. And he did it in Mantua on the Gonzagas nickel.
Lorenzo Bonoldi, our outstanding guide, arranged for us to visit the otherwise unavailable music room where Monteverdi played. The room is just raw space, unrestored, somewhat crude, a little dusty. It's a mid-size room. Somewhat rectangular but with a triangle of walls projecting into the center. It used to have an unusual ceiling like an umbrella and in the arcs where the umbrella meets the wall there were a semi-circle frescoes which are still visible. If those walls could talk.
Marlow and Wes
31 May 2013
Mantova, Italia
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Dearest Wes and Marlow,
ReplyDeleteI want to thank you for choosing Mantua as one of the steps of your tour. I have been following your tour on your blog. Guys: you are REALLY the kind of tourists, which Mantua needs and deserves. Usually people spend only few hours here, and too many times Mantua is presented only as the ideal destination of a “day tour”. But you have spent here FIVE days, exploring the real nature of this place. I was honored in being your guide. I’ve never met such interested, clever and enthusiastic visitors, travelling with an hand-written genealogical tree of the Gonzaga Family and the Book of the Courtier by Baldassarre Castiglione… incredible!