Keywords

• The Metropolitan Museum in New York houses an elegant marble statue of Orpheus playing the violin made by the sculptor Cristoforo Stati from Bracciano (1556-1619). This statue made its entry in the American museum in 1941 â€
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• together with the rest of the Blumenthal collection it belonged to â€
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• as the Apollo attributed to Pietro Francavilla
• but in reality the statue was the Orpheus that Cristoforo Stati had produced in 1592-1593 probably for Jacopo di Giovanni Corsi (1561- 1602)
• the older brother of Bardo Corsi already mentioned by Charles Avery as the likely purchaser. Jacopo is well-known to music historians: he was one of the leading personality of the famous Camerata deâ€
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• Bardi
• which marked the beginning of the new monodic accompanied style that later developed in the melodrama. The distinctive features of this interesting figure of Florentine patrician make us believe that Orpheus might be related to his main opera. The programme of the new recitar cantando
• the famous opera Eurydice performed on October 6 1600 at Palazzo Pitti with music by Jacopo Peri (and partly by Giulio Caccini) from a text by Ottavia Rinuccini. The memorable music event
• the scenery of Ludovico Cigoli and costumes of great beauty were financed for the most part by Jacopo
• who was the organizer too. Moreover
• he took part in the spectacle both as director and harpsichord player. As everybody knows the opera was part of the celebrations organized for the wedding ceremony of Maria deâ€
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• Medici with Enrico IV of France. Itâ€
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• s therefore more likely that to celebrate this important event Jacopo had ordered a sculpture that could engrave forever the image of the protagonist of the ancient history like a token of an event
• the drama
• that otherwise would have been considered ephemeral. At the same time the statue expressed a similarity between Orpheus
• a myth still alive in the Florentine humanistic culture and Jacopo Corsi not only for the plain analogy between the legendary poetâ€
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• s musical talent and that of the noble composer but particularly for the superiority and the power expressed by the ancient music symbolized by the Greek poet