The Theatre of Death: Noble Funerals with Music in Early Modern Europe

Lemaigre-Gaffier and Jorge Morales (both Universit de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)explained that the event was part of several ongoing projects and stressed its interdisciplinary character.The fifteen contributions to the online conference were arranged in five sessions of three papers, spread over two days and interspersed with three keynote addresses.Almost all participants were also speakers, and through the diversity of languages involved the delegates were taken on a lively tour through Europe: talks were in Italian, French, Spanish and English, reflecting the geographical areas covered in the papers.A carefully prepared booklet, disseminated before the event, offered all the abstracts -giving one the opportunity to familiarize oneself with the papers, especially those in a language that one has not fully mastered.All the same, it was not evident what the cover picture -Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin -had to do with the funerary theme of the conference (apart from depicting a death).The opening session was entitled 'Urban Space, Publicity and the Political Instrumentalisation of Death' .Its first two papers, in rather fast Italian, looked at early-modern Italian examples of these three topics.Maria Cristina Paciello (Liceo Torquato Tasso, Rome) discussed the commemoration of aristocratic funerals in seventeenth-century Rome, in her paper "'. . .scudi 30 e baiocchi 20 alli Musici per le Esequie": funerali e luoghi simbolici a Roma nel XVII secolo' ('Thirty scudi and twenty baiocchi to the musicians for the exequies': Funerals and Their Symbolism in Seventeenth-Century Rome).Paying special attention to the obsequies of members of the minor aristocracy, she used sources such as accounting books to recreate and analyse these events.Paciello showed helpful slides to illustrate her argument that those events made much use of the city space, with meticulously planned processional routes that were full of references to the deceased.Some visual markers (such as arrows as the text progressed) would have made the slides even more illustrative.Matteo Marni (Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) moved slightly forward in time and to the north of Italy.He spoke about the numerous elaborate aristocratic funerals, with their grand processions and lengthy services, all enriched by music, held in eighteenth-century Milan.His paper aimed at presenting an intriguing snapshot of a culture that was cut short, especially by political changes.