Pier Francesco Valentini and Musical Canons in the Visual Culture of Early Modern Rome

Pier Francesco Valentini (1586–1654), gentleman composer of Rome, lived in a time of significant change for European music. Conventional narratives in seventeenth-century music histories repeatedly emphasise the rise of new dramatic musical genres against the background of a resurgent style of solo accompanied singing and novel approaches to the affective delivery of text. Partly due to present-day historiographic biases, this musical revolution – now commonly known as the seconda pratica (after the term coined by none other than Claudio Monteverdi) and concentrated at first in Italian centres north of Rome – struggles to encapsulate the complex web of musical developments, including those arising out of the prima pratica, in the early seventeenth century in other centres like Rome. An account of the ongoing cultivation of contrapuntal styles at those centres might instead provide a bridge between sixteenth-century contrapuntal works and the masterpieces of later centuries.