In the early sixteenth century, the popes of the Renaissance were focused on one overriding goal: the glorification of Rome. Today, the very term “Renaissance Popes” conjures up a world of wealth and lavish artistic treasures, of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar wall, of Raphael’s spectacular imagery in the Stanza della Segnatura, of the unparalleled riches of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica, designed by Bramante with a great dome by Michelangelo. The unsurpassed fame of these monuments bears witness to the success of the Renaissance popes’ ambitious program: to guarantee forever Rome’s place as both the spiritual and artistic head of Roman Catholicism.

    Two centuries earlier, Rome had lost that position. In 1309, the French pope Clement V moved the papal headquarters from Rome to a mighty fortress in southern France in the city of Avignon. From 1309 to 1378, during what came to be called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the popes exiled themselves from the Vatican both because of powerful French influence and because of what amounted to city-wide warfare in Rome between two rival families and their supporters: the Colonna (known as the Ghibellines) and the Orsini (the Guelphs). When Pope Gregory XI moved back to Rome in 1376 and died there two years later, riots broke out, with Romans demanding a Roman pope. The election of Pope Urban VI in Rome, though, was followed a few months later by another election—by the same cardinals—initiating a period of nearly four decades when there were two claimants to the papal throne, a pope in Rome and an antipope in Avignon (the Great Schism, 1379-1417).

    Yet the papal crisis was the least of people’s problems. All of Europe was in shock from what has been termed the Little Ice Age, which caused the unprecedented freezing over of the Baltic Sea in three out of five years (1303, 1306, 1307), destroyed crops everywhere, and precipitated widespread starvation and disease. Then in 1348 came the Black Death, an epidemic of bubonic plague that annihilated as much as a third of the population of Europe. The terrible suddenness with which people became infected and died (sometimes overnight) was matched only by the terror of there being no cure and no effective means of prevention. On top of which, England and France were engaged interminably in the horrific Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Only gradually did Europe and the Rome we think of today emerge from the ruins.

    Early in the fifteenth century, the world witnessed an astounding architectural feat when Filippo Brunelleschi successfully planned and built an enormous dome to complete the cathedral in Florence (Santa Maria del Fiore). The building was formally dedicated on the important Marian feast of March 25, 1436, a few months before the dome reached completion. (Its lantern, also designed by Brunelleschi, would take another two decades to build.) Pope Eugenius IV himself was present to officiate at the dedication. Perhaps inspired by Brunelleschi’s architectural virtuosity, Pope Sixtus IV, a sophisticated, scholarly Franciscan friar (reigned 1471-1484), developed a great vision for “Rome reborn.” During his pontificate he planned a massive building program to make the Vatican the architectural and artistic glory of Christendom, beginning with the construction of a new papal chapel that would bear his name—the Sistine Chapel, constructed between the years 1473 and 1481.

    Pope Julius II (ruled 1503-1513) pursued Sixtus’s plans with aggressive energy, bringing his forceful personality to bear to ensure compliance from those he selected to carry out the vision, most famously Michelangelo, whom he brought to Rome to re-paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—the walls of which had already been painted in the 1480s by some of the most celebrated artists in Italy: Perugino, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, and Rosselli. The ceiling too had been painted at the same time, in the traditional manner with gold stars on a blue background, by Pier Matteo d’Amelia. But construction at St. Peter’s next door caused the chapel to shift on its foundation, opening a great crack in the ceiling. Julius thought this a propitious moment to improve on the ceiling’s imagery. After Michelangelo had completed the ceiling with scenes from Genesis (1508-12) and later replaced Perugino’s fresco on the west wall with “The Last Judgment” (1537-41), it could be seen that he, more successfully than his predecessors, captured in his art the spirit of Roman triumphalism Julius and later popes aspired to project. “Rome reborn” was now accomplished, and Michelangelo would continue to be its guiding spirit, creating masterpieces in architecture, painting, and sculpture until his death in 1564.

   The music in today’s program begins, however, not in Rome but in Florence, where Pope Eugenius IV was in residence. The two large-scale motets by Guillaume Du Fay, unusually, refer to Eugenius by name. Despite many modern features in melody and harmony, both works are designed in a medieval fashion, using a numerical underpinning, or mathematical ground plan—a “Pythagorean” structural feature necessarily prior in the compositional process to all subsequent musical decisions. By definition, such music is rational, mathematical, highly structured. The notion that music, in its mathematical aspect, could reflect the mathematical structure of the universe at large had shown impressive staying power, extending from the time of Plato, our first great witness to Pythagoras’s thinking, to the late Middle Ages, with ever-increasing sophistication and subtlety in its presentation. If we ask why composers during the Babylonian Captivity, Black Death, and Great Schism should have exploited the mathematical aspects of music, creating pieces that exhibited numerical proportions in the duration of one section to another, or in other structural ways (such as marking the Golden Section with a major cadence or surprise sonority), the answer may seem self-evident. Numbers, ratios, mathematical procedures, all express certainty, precision, predictability, and truth. The existence of people living in the late Middle Ages, however, was marked by uncertainty, unpredictability, and misery. Music, as a reflection of the eternal in number, provided a rational connection to the heavenly (mathematical) beauty they wished to enjoy in perpetuity after they died.

    In the case of Nuper rosarum flores, composed for the dedication ceremonies of Florence Cathedral, the four sections of the work relate durationally to one another in the proportions 6 : 4 : 2 : 3, the very numbers that art historian Marvin Trachtenberg has shown to be the generators of the dimensions of the Cathedral itself. By no coincidence, these numbers come from I Kings, where Solomon’s Temple is described as being 60 cubits in length, 40 cubits in width, 30 cubits in height, with a porch 20 cubits in depth. Though the musical proportions lie virtually undetected by the ear, they can be seen in the notation. In the first section of Nuper rosarum the two upper voices sing as a duet for 84 beats and are then joined by the lower voices for another 84. In the second section, the number of comparable beats of duet shrinks to 56, followed by the equivalent of 56 beats for four voices. In the third section the numbers are 28 beats of duet and 28 beats for four voices. In the fourth section the numbers expand to 42 and 42. Seven, the common factor of all these numbers, had long been a symbol of virginity and hence the number associated with the Virgin Mary, after whom the Cathedral was named. Seven also plays a determinative role in the structure of the poem the singers declaim, which consists of four stanzas of seven lines each, six of those lines containing seven syllables, the seventh containing eight syllables, for a total of 50 syllables per stanza. After the first 28 words, the poet has placed the name of the pope presiding over the dedication, Eugenius; just prior to the final 28 words comes the name of the city of Florence. After exactly 40 words, the 81-word poem changes from explaining the occasion at hand (the dedication) to making a supplication to Mary, that through her intercession the inhabitants of Florence might receive forgiveness and “welcome favors.”