Abstract
Were there rock stars in the fifteenth century? Most certainly yes, if we consider the long career of the Ferrarese virtuoso lutenist Pietrobono, who dazzled all those who heard him perform on the chitarino. When he was in his 70s he was deemed ‘primo homo dil mondo di sonar liuto’. No other fifteenth-century Italian musician was accorded similar praise, and reading these words makes us ruefully aware of the great gap in our knowledge: how can we judge Pietrobono’s fame as a musician when we have not a note of the music he played? Performance is elusive, and even more so in an age when instrumentalists did not normally play from written notation. Fortunately, a number of eyewitness accounts of Pietrobono as a performer survive. Interpreting them is not easy, since many are couched in humanistic Latin verse; others raise puzzling questions about his repertory and manner of performance. How are we to evaluate these reports? Modern suppositions of the way Pietrobono performed are quite contradictory. It is only by returning to the sources and to the context in which they were created that we may be able to paint a fuller picture of the lutenist of humble beginnings who became ‘prince of all’.