Giaches de Wert and the Palatine Basilica of Santa Barbara

The question of liturgy is fundamental to understanding how music and ceremony in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italian religious institutions actually worked. Far from being an unchanging, rigidly formalized structure, capable only of being received ‘passively’, the liturgy could and often was appropriated or modified by those in power, whether high-ranking ecclesiastics, autocratic rulers, or republican governments. This was most obviously true in the period before the Council of Trent resolved to abolish all local liturgies with less than two hundred years of life; nevertheless, as the particular case of the basilica of Santa Barbara in Mantua so clearly demonstrates, in practice the new atmosphere did not totally inhibit the creation of new liturgies. Stronger emphasis upon feasts associated with local patron saints was the most common expression of spiritual and political identity. Festal calendars could be revised so that civic and dynastic celebrations could be incorporated, and saints of even comparatively minor importance in the Roman calendar could assume greater importance in a local context, even one in which Roman use was being followed.

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