"Alla Battaglia": Music and Ceremony in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Music for the Doge in Early Renaissance Venice

“…The first stanza of the long dedicatory text was set to music; the later strophes were read after the performance of the first. 108 Andrew Hughes has found an ornate presentation copy of a motet from 1494 for the bishop of Sion, Switzerland, and suggests that Ecclesie militantis, Dufay's motet for the Venetian pope Eugenius IV, may have originally existed in such a format as well. 109 Different members of the audience would have had different access to and degrees of acquaintance with the motets.…”