The span of Josquin’s life is roughly framed by two momentous events in European history: the invention of the printing press around 1450, and Luther’s 1517 attack on corruption in the Catholic church that launched the Protestant Reformation. The first greatly facilitated the second by spreading the message of religious reform, just as the development of music printing was to make Josquin’s compositions available throughout Europe and secure his influence on future generations. Luther himself was later to praise Josquin as “the master of notes” (“der noten meister”) and claimed the composer for reformed styles of worship with his declaration that God preaches the Gospel “also in music, as can be seen in Josquin, from whom all composition flows gladly … not compelled and forced by rules.” The tribute testifies to the continued place of Josquin’s sacred music in Protestant minds and hearts. Nonetheless, the composer’s death in 1521 spared him from witnessing the religious schism that split the Christian world in the 16th century. His career was essentially a product of what art historians call the quattrocento, the era of the 1400s that first saw the revival of arts and learning known as the European Renaissance.

Josquin lived and worked in a turbulent world of shifting alliances and territorial rivalries that would lead to persistent conflict, but which also fostered a growing internationalism in the creative arts.

The later 15th century was not without doctrinal controversy, and Josquin is thought to have been sympathetic to Girolamo Savonarola’s campaign in the 1490s to reform religious and civic life in Florence. The radical Dominican friar’s brief control of the city before he was arrested and executed was a result of the unrest caused by the French invasion of Italy in 1494–5, and Josquin, an employee both at the Sforza court in Milan and possibly the court of French king Louis XII during the period, might have found himself very much in the middle of the military confrontations that ensued in the following decades.

The composer lived and worked in a turbulent world of shifting alliances and territorial rivalries that would lead to persistent conflict in the 16th century, but which also fostered a growing internationalism in the creative arts, as architects, painters, and musicians moved around the continent and absorbed fresh influences. Italy was the prime destination of migrating artists in Josquin’s time, and what he picked up in Rome, Milan, and Ferrara greatly contributed to the mature style that made him Europe’s leading composer.

Music was just one of the arts that contemporaries saw as being rescued from the obscurity of the Middle Ages: Galileo Galilei’s father, the music theoretician and composer Vincenzo Galilei, claimed that it was only in the years when Josquin was active that people sought to recover music “from the darkness in which it was buried.” There was a good deal of propaganda in such claims, as Josquin’s debt to medieval counterpoint and long-standing popular forms suggests. The idea that Europe since the fall of Rome a thousand years before had been a stagnant backwater, lacking creativity and intellectual vitality, suited those who saw themselves in the vanguard of a new age. But although they underestimated medieval cultures and failed to see that the seeds of cultural revival had in some cases been planted in earlier centuries, the generation of artists and scholars that came of age in the quattrocento could legitimately claim to be part of a new era in the Christian world.

At the end of the 14th century this sense of origins began to coalesce into a program to reclaim the essence of classical culture, as scholars came to regard the ancient world as providing models for proper living and aesthetic improvement.

The prime focus of the movement we call Renaissance humanism was the revival of classical civilization: the arts, philosophy, and statecraft of ancient Greece and Rome. Many of the writings of classical authors, especially Aristotle, Vergil, and Ovid, had never been forgotten, and Roman ruins, in various stages of decay, could be seen all over Europe. Rome itself, now the seat of Papal authority, constituted a largely unbroken link with the ancient imperial city. At the end of the 14th century this sense of origins began to coalesce into a program to reclaim the essence of classical culture, as scholars came to regard the ancient world as providing models for proper living and aesthetic improvement. Recovery meant curing the ills of the present by rediscovering the wisdom and achievements of the distant past, prior to the intervening “dark ages,” and to this end a huge effort went into hunting down lost and unknown texts and editing the works of major authors for a new audience. The invention of printing greatly boosted this enterprise, of course, and much excitement was generated by the search for manuscripts in monastic libraries and elsewhere. Major discoveries filled out the picture of past civilizations with a chronicle of rise, decline, and fall that offered object lessons to students of politics and statecraft like Machiavelli, who confessed that in his reading of classical authors he felt entirely at home: “There I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born.” He was far from alone in this belief.

Renaissance discovery took many forms, not all of them purely intellectual or artistic. This was also the era of major geographical exploration and expanding frontiers, including the discovery of a sea route to the Indies in 1488, closely followed by Columbus’s landfall in the Americas in 1492. Later, in 1522, just a year after Josquin’s death, the survivors of Magellan’s pioneering voyage to circumnavigate the globe returned to Spain. The medieval mappa mundi of three populated continents, two of them—Asia and Africa—largely unknown to Europeans, gave way to a more accurate and detailed geography that illustrated global trade routes and, in time, opportunities for scientific research and colonial exploitation. In many ways this period marks the beginning of what we now call globalization, and it has shaped—for better or worse—what we call the modern world to this day.

Older views of the European Renaissance emphasized the break with medieval habits of thought and the development of a secular worldview, focusing on a newfound confidence in human enterprise and the growth of individualism. There is much that is correct in this reading (closely associated with the seminal study by Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860). As already noted, contemporaries were keen to see themselves as banishing the recent past and reinventing civilization, and in the 15th century were laying the foundations for the massive growth of European power in later centuries. They looked back to Greece and Rome for inspiration and guidance, but their achievements would, in the decades after Josquin’s death, lead to the growing conviction that modernity had outstripped the ancients and was poised to take control of the physical world. However, the triumphalism of the Baroque era was rather different from the optimism of the 1400s, which in various parts of Europe involved a more nuanced relationship with the medieval era.

Josquin was one of many artists who moved from Northern Europe to Italy in search of patronage and fresh inspiration. How this shaped his compositional technique is a matter for musical experts to debate, but where painters, sculptors, and architects were concerned, it involved an exposure to classical models and aesthetic theory that were less in evidence in the north. Outside Italy, the dominant church architecture was that of Gothic cathedrals, and for much of the 15th century painting and sculpture in the Netherlands and Germany continued to be shaped by the style broadly known as International Gothic. This did not prevent artists from innovating in important ways, but it made it more difficult to see their work as a complete break with the past. The vitality and attention to detail in medieval Gothic art debunks a long-lived myth about the Renaissance, that it replaced a disregard for accurate representation of human beings with the first serious attempt at their naturalistic portrayal.

The paradox of the Italian Renaissance, particularly in its quattrocento phase, is that an era celebrated for its liberating of artistic expression was so intensely bound by rules.

Anyone who has examined the figure carvings on choirstalls in Gothic cathedrals will know how carefully their craftsmen drew from life. The same is true of late-medieval paintings that are ignorant of Renaissance theories of perspective but create crowd scenes teeming with lifelike individuals. What is genuinely new in early Renaissance art is an interest in the spaces that individual figures occupy. The many tributes at the time to the lifelikeness achieved by quattrocento painters are not so much to their skill at portraiture as to their ability to place their human subjects in a facsimile of three-dimensional space, to give their bodies weight and volume in a realistic context. This owed much to newly developed techniques of perspective drawing, and to other severely mathematical calculations like those that replaced the open, soaring space of a Gothic cathedral with the symmetrical, temple-like design of many Italian churches.

The paradox of the Italian Renaissance, particularly in its quattrocento phase, is that an era celebrated for its liberation of artistic expression was so intensely bound by rules. The search for coherent ways of representing physical space on a flat surface, or the need (as humanists saw it) to restore in their buildings the harmony and sense of order that had been sacrificed in cavernous Gothic cathedrals and medieval palaces—these were challenges that were addressed with a formidable body of theory. The results of this approach could sometimes be cold and formulaic, yet the early-Renaissance endeavor to create a disciplined aesthetic based on classical principles and the science of perspective produced some of the most beautiful art and architecture ever made. Architects and sculptors had classical models to follow, of course, but these were not available to painters and composers, who had to find ways of developing the techniques and expressive vocabulary specific to their art in order to be participants in this new era. And when Luther admired Josquin’s freedom from obsolete rules (he was aligning doctrinal law with old-fashioned artistic method), he was really acknowledging how rigorous experiment in the arts during the quattrocento had released creative energies that would fuel the achievement of future generations.




Anthony Parr is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and is now a Reader at the Huntington Library in California. He has edited and written extensively about English Renaissance theater and travel writing, and contributed to the New Grove Dictionaries of Music and Opera.