Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII.

Frederick Hammond's book on Barbarini patronage is as painstakingly researched as his lengthy and well-known studies on Girolamo Frescobaldi, a Roman composer whose last decade was spent in the orbit of Pope Urban VIII and his nephews. From the first paragraphs of this newest effort, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome, the reader is assured of two things: Hammond's passion for his subject and a panoramic vision of a papacy's musical patronage, exhaustively researched. Indeed, the book reveals itself to be the product of years of campaigns in the Vatican and other archives, and its appeal to the particular interests of the specialist is immediately evident.

In part one - "Mirabil Congiuntura: The Barberini and Their Program" - Hammond provides the social and financial history of Pope Urban VIII's Florentine family, explores his personal ideals in a post Counter-Reformation age, and introduces the reader to the grandeur of his munificence as a patron. A swift precis of Roman currency is followed by a deluge of details in both English and Italian relating to Barberini accounts, revenues, investments, houses, employees and treasured articles. Here, too, are penetrating sketches of the Pontiff's nephews, crafty and competitive spirits who formed the dramatis personae of Vatican politics in the 1630s and '40s.

The second part - "The Musical Establishments" - describes the musical forces at the Pope's command, the Cappelia Pontificia, the churches and musicians specifically favored by the family, and their yearly as well as quotidian duties. Hammond also makes an attempt to divine what may have taken place in the accademie, gatherings of scholarly and intellectual elite which hovered around the seats of Roman power like Barberini bees.

It is in the third section - "Symbolic Spectacle: The Achievement of the Nephews" - that this book truly begins to address the materials suggested by its title. The archival holdings which describe or illustrate secular and sacred spettacoli of Urban's reign are, for the historian, among the richest in existence. Hammond calls upon a host of diverse materials: payment records, letters, ambassadorial dispatches, chronicles, instrument repair bills, drawings and paintings (the reproductions of which in the book are of uneven quality). Readers interested in dance, scene design, staging, special effects and the fantastic machines of early opera can thank Hammond for an excellent summary of research into those areas. The book's final pages are devoted to operatic productions for the Barberini from approximately 1624 to 1642.

While this book does eventually cover the whole of its subject, it is nevertheless more devoted to the description of spectacle than to music, and still more to the Barberini than to either of the other two. This caveat aside, it is nevertheless a study which otherwise affords a thorough and compelling treatment of its subjects.

REBECCA A. EDWARDS Santa Clara University