High Museum brings Florentine art, music

MUSIC PERFORMANCES

Live in-gallery music will be performed at designated times and dates, with some times subject to change:

Visitors to the Duomo in 15th-century Florence must have found the experience mind-boggling.

Not only were they surrounded by unearthly sculpture and painting, but the soaring 171-foot interior of the dome reverberated with the sounds of choirs, musicians and a pipe organ powered by young men furiously stomping on multiple bellows.

Some of that boggle has come to Atlanta in the High Museum’s new show, “’Make a Joyful Noise’: Renaissance Art and Music at Florence Cathedral.”

As lively as the title suggests, the show is focused on the exquisite carvings of Renaissance master Luca della Robbia, whose bas-relief marble panels are crowded with young people blowing horns, playing tambourines, dancing and singing and kicking up their heels.

The panels once adorned the choir lofts in the Florence cathedral, and they give the impression that a service in the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore was a riotous good time.

They’ve never traveled to the United States before, and only one panel has ever left Italy. Therefore, metro Atlantans will have a rare glimpse of the earliest work of della Robbia, sculpture that High director Michael E. Shapiro calls “an undisputed masterpiece.”

But a silent display of sculpture does not a riot make. To complete the picture, the High will bring in musicians to perform early choral and instrumental music in a connecting gallery, treating museum visitors to the sounds of the era.

We have a good idea what that music sounded like because of surviving manuscripts. Three gargantuan examples of those manuscripts are also on display at the High. They are three highly decorated choir books used by the singers of the time, one of which is opened to an illustration depicting a scene from the consecration of the Duomo itself in 1436, featuring a procession led by Pope Eugene IV in rose-colored robes.

The books have survived the centuries, though one bears marks of the damage from the flood of 1966. A giant, three-sided lectern, made of highly carved walnut, is also on display.

In an example of the High’s attention to detail, the archaic notation visible in the pages of the choir books was translated into modern notation by former Atlantan Robert Bolyard, who also arranged for a choir to record the chants and songs indicated by those strange square notes.

Those recordings will be included in the audio tour of the exhibit, so that visitors can actually hear what they’re looking at. “We tried our best when we sang them, even though we don’t speak Latin and we’re not 17th-century monks,” Bolyard said. “We still tried to give it that ebb and flow.”

Gary M. Radke, the High’s consulting curator of Italian art, coordinated the exhibition, taking advantage of the fact that the cathedral’s museum in Florence where the panels are usually displayed would be temporarily closed for construction.

Radke first saw della Robbia’s carvings more than 40 years ago as a grad student in Florence, but his delight in their beauty was clearly undiminished as he inspected the panels recently during the High’s installation of the exhibit.

“Look, this boy’s tapping his foot!” he pointed out. “And here, look at the fingers of the harp player,” visible through the plane of the strings, as if the artist could make marble semi-transparent. “Luca,” he said, “was revolutionary.”

As Radke spoke, choral music filtered into the room from a gallery above. By coincidence, the High is exhibiting a sound installation on the Skyway Level of the Wieland Pavilion, just above the della Robbia exhibit. Created by Janet Cardiff, it is an 11-minute loop of a 16th-century motet for 40 voices, played through 40 separate speakers. One can hear it faintly in the gallery below, lending a shimmering early music aura to the exhibit.

Live musicians will reinforce that feeling, performing a variety of Renaissance and other early music throughout most weekend days in an adjoining gallery, making this exhibit as joyful and noisy as the title implies.