There are three musicians depicted on the title page of the collection “Frottole intabulate da sonare organi,” published by Andrea Antico in Rome in 1517: a harpsichord player, a singer, and a lutenist. An extremely common iconography, were it not for one macroscopic detail: the lutenist is a monkey.
The primate, historically an allegory of mischief, cunning, and slander, is meant as a stinging mockery of Antico’s rival, Ottaviano Petrucci, also a music printer in the Venetian sphere, however. Although Petrucci enjoyed exclusive rights to print keyboard music, which he never exploited, he had linked his name to the lute with his production of frottole intavolate for the instrument. In 1516 Petrucci lost his printing privileges on keyboard music, and this was the opportunity for Antico to publish the aforementioned “Frottole intabulate…,” as well as the first Italian printing of arrangements of inlaid frottole for fretted instruments. Aware of his advantage over Petrucci, Antico decided to mock him by portraying him as a monkey, thus wanting to ridicule his rival’s editorial choices.
Despite the attitude of mockery and superiority shown in the curious frontispiece, Antico actually drew heavily from Petrucci’s work, ‘copying’ it in form and content, including in his own books many of the ‘hits’ already published by Petrucci, and publishing, in turn, intabulations of frottole for voice and lute himself.
The musical offering is a selection of excerpts from the books of the two rival publishers, in what we can imagine as a musical war fought to the sound of the secular form most in use at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries: the Frottola.
