Mattio Rampollini (?June 2, 1497 – c. 1553) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

. Employed by the Medici

Medici

The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of the Tuscan countryside,...

, he was a colleague of the more famous Francesco Corteccia

Francesco Corteccia

Francesco Corteccia was an Italian composer, organist, and teacher of the Renaissance. Not only was he one of the best known of the early composers of madrigals, and an important native Italian composer during a period of domination by composers from the Low Countries, but he was the most...

, and was noted for his madrigal

Madrigal (music)

A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....

s, some composed for the opulent entertainments of the Medici court.

Biography

Little is known about his early life. He was probably born in Florence, and the only records of his career are from that city. When Bernardo Pisano left Florence Cathedral to go to Rome in 1520, Rampollini took over the job of singing teacher to the boys there; around this time he may have been Corteccia's teacher as well.

In 1539 he provided some of the music for the wedding of Duke Cosimo de' Medici

Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

Cosimo I de' Medici was Duke of Florence from 1537 to 1574, reigning as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1569.-Biography:...

 and Eleanora di Toledo. The Venetian

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 printer Antonio Gardano

Antonio Gardano

Antonio Gardano was an Italian composer and important music publisher based in Venice. He arrived in in the city as a musico francese whose musical compositions had been published in Lyons by Moderne from 1532...

 printed two madrigals from this wedding in 1539, Ecco la fida and Lieta per honorarte, along with the rest of the music (mostly composed by Corteccia). He evidently was employed by the Medici for his entire life. The largest surviving work of his, the setting of a cycle of seven canzoni by Petrarch

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

, was published in 1554 by Jacques Moderne

Jacques Moderne

Jacques Moderne was an Italian-born music publisher active in France in the Renaissance Era....

 of Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

. Much other music is presumed to have been lost, particularly if it never reached the publishing houses in Venice or Lyon. A few of his madrigals found their way to anthologies, one as late as 1562.

Music

Alfred Einstein contrasted his work to that of his Florentine colleague and probable student, Corteccia, calling the latter "unliterary." While little of Rampollini's music has survived, it had some innovative qualities: he set the seven Petrarch canzoni as a cycle, a trend which began around mid-century (the date of the composition of the Petrarch cycle is not known, except that it was before 1554); and he was attentive to textural contrast over large time-spans, as each member of the cycle uses a different grouping of three, four, five, or six voices, but each ends with all of the voices. He was a modest man, as indicated in his preface to the collection, in which he stated that the poetry would have been better set by those more worthy, such as Josquin or Willaert.

Rampollini's setting of the Petrarch canzoni can be found in Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae

Corpus mensurabilis musicae

The Corpus mensurabilis musicae is a collected print edition of most of the sacred and secular vocal music of the late medieval and Renaissance period in western music history, with an emphasis on the central Franco-Flemish and Italian repertories...

, vol. xxxii/7, ed. in 1974.