Was it in a world upside-down that the cello was played “da spalla”?
Our visit to Villa Contarini
Last month we finally went to visit Villa Contarini!
We gave you a brief anticipation with the short video here.
I wrote finally, because it was a long time postponed trip, as often are those closer to us. At first, the suggestion came from the Japanese da spalla cellist Koji Miki, specifically from an image he shared on Facebook, taken from the book “L’orologio del piacere.”
The outstanding project for the village was only partially realised; however, it’s not hard to imagine how arriving here was a breathtaking moment, even with one missing half!
This Villa was realised in the 16th century by Marco Contarini, procuratore of the San Marco Republic, in modern words, Venice’s prime minister. The Contarini family enumerates 4 Doges (the chief of the republic) and 48 procuratori in a couple of centuries.
Venice is today a touristic paradise. It’s breathtaking in every view and corner, even for us who live so close and regularly go there. However, 400 years ago, there were a few problems. Being built literally into the sea, the climate in the summer was so hot and humid that it became a nightmare, especially if you were wealthy and had to wear those elegant but complex and quite heavy clothes.
Venice was a merchant’s town, with luxury goods and spices coming from around the world. But there is no food production, except from fish. So, the city needed fields in the country to produce flour, wine, meat, milk and eggs, fruit and vegetables. All these goods had to be transported, so rivers and navigable channels were used for this purpose. All the wealthy and noble families in Venice also owned a villa in the country: today, the Veneto region is punctuated with around 4000 villas from this period that served as food production facilities and recreation places for the summer.
Being the wealth of the town based on international trade on the sea, politics was the most critical survival activity. Venice ambassadors were everywhere and were always the best informed, so being in Venice meant having almost real-time news and gossip from all over the world.
Villa Contarini was built as a 16th-century recreation village for politicians, nobles, ambassadors and wealthy merchants. During the summer, something like 800 guests were invited from all over Europe and here is where Venetian politics and social life took place.
The villa had not only all the food production facilities but also a park for hunting and walks, endless corridors (180 mt of corridors and small rooms on each side) and porches where the guests could meet and arrange their businesses. The corridors with tiny rooms are filled with frescoes illustrating exotic scenes and animals (things that Venice discovered, knew and brought to the European world) and battles to celebrate Venice's grandeur and power.
In the main central building, there was an innovative theatre, dining room and dancing room to entertain the guests at best, so being invited here in the summer was an enormous social status recognition that every powerful man in Europe was aspiring to, and none would refuse.
The villa was, in other words, not only a tool for the Republic of Venice to control the politics of the time but also the greatest possible marketing campaign. Some of the small rooms were also showcases of luxury goods coming from overseas or those crafted in place, like glass artefacts and merletti (laces), which, of course, guests could buy and bring home.
Books were printed in place with the program and description of the parties so guests could bring them home, as well as written descriptions and illustrations to help them spread the word of Venetian grandeur and their participation in it.
Aside from the villa, Mr Contarini founded the “ospedale delle vergini”, where girls (orphans or coming from families living in poor conditions, or probably even peasants daughters) were raised and educated. They learned skills that were usually out of reach for girls of their means: they learned to make laces, to design and sew dresses with silk and velvets, to embroider on fine linen or tapestries, and, as a lesser artistic skill, they also made jute bags to stock and move the goods. They also learned to write and read, to print books (and they run printing facilities on site), and those more skilled were educated in music. The Contarini family acquired a collection of fine instruments in Venice and brought them there for the virgins to play during the summer entertainments.
Our interest would, of course, be in the instrument collection, but not much is known about it, as the heirs later dispersed it. Some of them are in the Correr museum in Venice, as one of the last heirs married a Correr, but there is no trace of those Contarini instruments, which the books attest to be marked with the letters MC. Some rumours are that some of them ended up in the Augsburg collection that is now in Wien, but there are no confirms.
Even greater interest could be in the vast collection of manuscripts of theatre works and cantatas performed here in the summer, works composed in 1600 Venice and now in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.
This impressive collection counts 112 drammi per musica (theatre works with words and music) written by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, Alessandro Stradella and others, and other works by Benedetto Marcello (again cantate and drammi in musica), Domenico Scarlatti, Baldassare Galuppi, Leonardo Vinci, Davide Perez, Johann Adolf Hasse.
The “music room” is worth all of our attention. Unfortunately, the floors are not secure, so it is impossible to visit it until they find the money to restore it (sob). We could only have explanations of how it worked and consult some pics of books for sale at the building entrance.
The image above is a bit imaginative, but starting from that and watching the actual building pic, we can quite well imagine the orchestra in action.
This is also called “the room of the upside-down guitar” because the shape reminds that of the body of a baroque guitar. Let us explain it better with the help of images.
In the upside-down guitar room, also the society classes were upside down. On the ground floor, the royals or prime ministers enjoyed their party comfortably sitting at a table served with never-ending dinners. Minor guests were standing and watching, hoping for a better position for the next year, drowning the frustration in anticipating the success and interest they would gain at home when talking about this gathering.
Other VIPs were on the upper floor, standing and being served with refreshes, watching the more important ones from the balconade. Over them, a ceiling with an octagonal opening, like a sound hole, from which the sound of an orchestra came to the room.
On the second floor level, instead of an orchestra pit, we have an orchestra top balconade. This is curious. The floor of the room over the party room was left unoccupied, and the orchestra had to stand and play on the balconade all around that room. So, in the usual chaos and tight space conditions, they needed and appreciated small basses.
The sound, from the orchestra balconade, was reflected from the concave ceiling towards the octagonal sound hole and the lower floor with the guests. So nobody could see the virgin players.
The natural attraction and focal point of these concerts were the VIPs having dinner, not the players.
On the concave ceiling, there were some long and tight “slits”, the “upside-down guitar strings”, bringing the sound to a room at the same level as the guest's balconade. This room has another octagonal sound hole on the ceiling, and is decorated with mirrors on the walls. It was an elegant room where guests enjoyed refreshes and could approach the balconade.
On our next issue, we will translate relevant paragraphs from the “Orologio del piacere”, which was a description of the ten days celebrations for the visit of an important guest. We will also share something from the frescoes of the place, and some other pics to give a better idea of the place. Stay tuned!
Updates from our workshop
If you want to take the chance and try one of these beauties, they will be in US: get in touch with Brobst violin shop!
