Artists (incl. musicians)

Michel Sittow was born in Reval c. 1469 today the Estonian capital city of Tallinn. Possibly trained in the workshop of Hans Memling in Bruges he subsequently moved to work in the Iberian Peninsula where he first held the position of court painter. This monograph undertakes research on this phase of his career. In the Kingdom of Castille Michel Sittow was appointed painter to Queen Isabella and became a member of her household with an impressive annual salary. Thanks to the analysis of archival documents and formal and iconographical studies on Sittow’s paintings it is possible to explain the court painter’s life circumstances and describe the benefits he enjoyed and the difficulties he faced. The Castilian period was crucial for Michel Sittow’s career since over the course of his professional life he also resided at the courts of Philip the Fair Margaret of Austria Christian II of Denmark and Charles V all relatives of his first royal patron. While serving European monarchs he transferred Memling’s techniques and visual language beyond the Low Countries and developed his artistic practice and style. The analysis of the various contexts Michel Sittow worked in sheds light on his oeuvre and his possible privileged status as a courtier which provided opportunities to establish a flourishing and ambitious career in northern and southern Europe.

This multidisciplinary volume celebrates the scholarship and career of Lawrence Earp whose work has profoundly shaped the fields of Machaut studies musicology codicology and fourteenth-century studies in general. For over four decades Earp’s meticulous scholarship and generosity in collaboration have been a constant inspiration for medieval scholars students and colleagues alike. The twenty-six innovative essays herein gratefully acknowledge his influence and showcase a variety of fresh approaches. Recognizing both the breadth and depth of Earp’s work the sections of this book are devoted to bibliography historiography literature art history and several musicological topics. Many of the chapters focus on the oeuvre of Guillaume de Machaut but readers will also find explorations on Hildegard of Bingen Philippe de Vitry child performers in medieval theater notation genre motets from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries and polyphony in Italy and England. Made possible by Earp’s foundational and guiding work this amply illustrated volume invites future interdisciplinary research.

Ivan Lukačić (born around 1585 died in 1648) composer Conventual Franciscan long-time “maestro di cappella” of the cathedral in Split is a typical “hero” of local historiography. As early as 1935 the Croatian-American musicologist Dragan Plamenac (real name Karl Siebenschein) prepared a selection from the only known collection of Lukačić’s compositions the Sacrae cantiones (Venice 1620). In the same year Plamenac introduced Croatian Renaissance and Baroque music to the local audience for the first time at a concert held at the Croatian Music Institute. In the aftermath of Plamenac’s emigration to the USA in 1939 it took several decades for new archival stylistic interdisciplinary and international research in Croatian musicology to take place. Despite the availability of earlier material as well as contemporary musical publications of Lukačić’s work (J. Andreis Zagreb 1970; E. Stipčević Padua 1986) it is not an exaggeration to say that Lukačić still remains unknown internationally. For many years a number of studies of Lukačić and the music of his contemporaries from the “other eastern coast of the Adriatic” published almost exclusively in Croatian and thus the international professional public had very limited access to them. This collection of studies dedicated to Lukačić and to the musical and cultural contacts between the two Adriatic coasts is the first volume to be published in both English and Italian. The echoes of the contacts between Italy and Croatia reached the Royal Palace in Portugal shops selling printed music in Denmark and church archives in Slovenia and Poland. The aim of this book is to follow the traces of that cultural dissemination.