Gaspard Duiffoprugcar and French Renaissance Viols

Gaspard Duiffoprugcar [Tieffenbrucker] was a member of a German family of instrument builders from the village of Tieffenbruck, near Roßhaupten in Bavaria.¹ In 1810, Choren and Fayolle, in their Dictionnaire historique des musiciens artistes et amateurs, provided a biographical portrait of Duiffoprugcar’s early career in France:

DUIFFOPRUGCAR, (Gaspard), famous luthier, born in the Tyrol region of Italy toward the end of the fifteenth century. After traveling to Germany, he came to settle in Bologna in the first years of the sixteenth century. François I, King of France, having come to this city in 1515 to establish a charter with Pope Leo X, heard of Duiffoprugcar’s superior talents and made such advantageous offers to this artist as to convince him to come and settle in Paris; the latter accepted them. It appears that the plan of the French monarch was to have the instruments necessary for the service of his chambre and his chapel made in a manner worthy of his age and of his magnificence. It further seems that the cloudy climate of the capital did not suit this artist as he asked for and obtained permission to retire to Lyons, where he probably ended his career. He was still there in 1520.²

No definitive evidence has yet to surface connecting Duiffoprugcar’s relocation to France to overtures from King François I; as was typical in the nineteenth century, Choren and Fayolle do not provide citations. François I certainly met Pope Leo X in Bologna in 1515. During this sojourn the French king recruited Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in France until his death in 1519. As I will discuss below, another branch of the Duiffoprugcar family had a workshop in Bologna, so Garpard Duiffoprugcar’s relocation to this city would have been a logical choice.

It is tempting to imagine musicians at the French court performing on instruments made by Duiffoprugcar. French court records list two musicians as viol players beginning in 1529. Pierre D’Auxerre is documented in payment records as a multi-instrumentalist, including as a performer on viols, for the French court between 1529 and 1572. Jehan Bellac, another court musician who performed on viols among other instruments, likewise appears in court documents between 1529 and 1560.³ It was only after Duiffoprugcar relocated to France that the French court began to employ these two joüeurs de violle. We lack definitive evidence of who made viols for the French court or where the court acquired them, but mounting evidence points to the transfer of the viol from Italy to France.⁴ Perhaps Duiffoprugcar was a central agent in this transfer.

Duiffoprugcar settled in Lyons in 1533 and became a naturalized French subject in 1558. King Henri II issued “Lettres de naturalité pour Gaspard Dieffenbruger” from Paris in January 1558. The “Lettres de naturalité” begin:

Henri, by the grace of God, King of France, to all present and to come, health. Knowing that we received the humble supplication of our dear and well-loved Caspar Dieffenbruger (German, lute maker, native of Fressin, imperial city in Germany) containing that it has been a long time since he left the place of his birth to come to live in our city of Lyons, where he is at present residing with firm and entire deliberation to live there and to end his days under our obedience and as our true and natural subject if our good pleasure is to hold and receive . . . ⁵

While evidence is lacking to connect Duiffoprugcar to François I, the fact that Henri II, the second son and successor of François I, referred to him as “dear and well-loved” suggests a royal connection to the Duiffoprugcar workshop and approbation of Duiffoprugcar’s talents as a luthier.

Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey engraved the following portrait of Duiffoprugcar in 1565, six years before his death.

*Gaspard Duiffoprugcar*
Engraved by Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey, 1565.

Among the cluttered pile of string instruments depicted in his portrait is at least one five-string viol with turned-out corners—a distinctive feature on many French Renaissance viols—in the lower right of the image. A colored version of this engraving survives in the front of a manuscript lutebook owned by Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647), a diplomat, political correspondent, and art collector from Augsburg. Hainhofer is known today for his curation of his own Kunstschränke (curiosity cabinets) and for acquiring objects for the Kunstkammer (art room or curiosity cabinet) of humanist nobles. These curiosity cabinets often included collections of musical instruments and chests of viols.⁶ The lute manuscript, today held in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, was assembled in Augsburg around 1604.

*Gaspard Duiffoprugcar*
*Engraved by Pierre II Woeiriot de Bongey, 1565.*
Vierter Thail Philippi Hainhoferi Lautenbucher
HAB Cod. Guelf. 18.8 Aug. 2°; Heinemann-Nr. 2214.
http://diglib.hab.de/mss/18-8-aug-2f/start.htm

It is possible that Duiffoprugcar became acquainted with five-string viols before he permanently relocated to Lyons. Both German and French sources describe five-string viols, albeit with different tuning systems. In Martin Agricola’s treatise Musica Instrumentalis deudsch (first published in 1529), he presents fretted “grossen Geigen” with either five or six strings tuned in fourths with a third.⁷ After multiple reprints, Agricola released an extensively revised edition of his treatise in 1545. In it he introduces the “grosse welsche geigen” (large foreign, i.e. Italian, geigen), a family of instruments that has frets with four or five strings tuned in fourths with a third.⁸ Hans Gerle, in his Musica Teutsch auff die grossen und kleinen geygen (German Music for Large and Small Geygen) first published in 1532, likewise claims that the fretted “grossen Geygen” (i.e. viols), have five or six strings tuned in fourths with a third.⁹ Gerle included a woodcut depicting both a five-string viol and a six-string viol.¹⁰

Hans Gerle, *Musica Teutsch auff dis grossen und kleinen geygen* (Nurenberg, 1532 and 1546), fol. A4r.

Intabulations for five-string viols, which survive in these German sources and which existed in a now-lost French source, reflect the popularity of amateur consort playing by the middle of the sixteenth century. Following his introductory treatise on how to play viols, Gerle includes intabulations (in German lute tablature) of German Tenorieder and Psalm settings for consorts of four viols. Like Claude Gervaise, who intabulated ten chansons for viol consort using French lute tablature (and also presented the same chansons in mensural notation) in his lost Premier livre de violle contenant dix chansons (Paris, c. 1547; 2nd. ed. 1554), Gerle intabulated examples from genres that appealed to bourgeois amateur musicking. Both Gerle and Gervaise published tutors aimed at helping the amateur public quickly get up to speed with playing consort music socially. By presenting the four-part settings in tablature instead of in mensural notation, both authors allowed amateur musicians to skirt hours of instruction in music theory and in learning how to read mensural notation. Gerle responded to changing tastes of bourgeois consumers in his 1546 publication Musica und Tabulatur auff die Instrume[n]t der kleinen und grossen Geygen auch Lautten; he intabulated French chansons.¹¹ In 1523 or 1524, a Bavarian of the merchant class named Jorg Weltzell also intabulated, among other pieces like dances and the the “Cum sancto spiritu” from Josquin’s Missa De Beata Virgine, German Tenorlieder (again using German lute tablature) in a notebook.¹² Bettina Hoffman decodes his tunings (fourths with a third), which are identical to Gerle’s tunings.¹³ Again Weltzell’s manuscript preserves intabulations of consort music of four-part songs suitable for bourgeois musicking.

A four-part chanson as intabulated in *Hans Gerle, Musica und Tabulatur auff die Instrume[n]t der kleinen und grossen Geygen auch Lautten* *(Nürnberg: J. Formschneyder, 1546)*, fol. D2r-v.

Gaspard Duiffoprugcar was living in Lyons when the Huguenot Lyonnais composer Philibert Jambe de Fer (1515–1566) published his L’Épitome musical des tons, sons et accordz, es voix humaines, fleustes d’Alleman, flesustes à neuf trous, violes, & violons (1556). In the chapter about violes, he asserts that it was “an instrument played by gentlemen, merchants, and other men of virtue.”¹⁴ Once again the amateur status of the instrument is affirmed. With his shop in Lyons and a renowned family name of lute and viol builders, Duiffoprugcar would have been poised to sell five-string viols to the bourgeois “men of virtue” described by Jambe de Fer. Perhaps the viol with ornate marquetry depicted in Jambe de Fer’s treatise was modeled after one of the renowned luthier’s instruments.

Ripped page depicting a five-string French viol in Philibert Jambe de Fer’s L’Épitome Musical (Lyons, 1556).

A five-string French viol as illustrated in Philibert Jambe de Fer’s L’Épitome Musical (Lyons, 1556) and later reprinted in Marin Marsenne’s Harmonie Universelle (Paris, 1636).

Although five-string viols were tuned differently in Germany and in France, Gaspard Duiffoprugcar presents a point of intersection between the two traditions of performing on five-string viols in amateur consort playing.

The Duiffoprugcar workshop in Lyons also maintained strong ties to an Italian branch of this family of luthiers and instrument wholesalers. Due in part to the propensity of family members to name their sons after themselves and in part to an incomplete historical record, the family lineage has been the topic of much scholarly debate and confusion. The elder Ulrich (I) [Odorico, Rigo] Tieffenbrucker (d. before 1560) established the Italian branch in Venice and Bologna. Ulrich (I) had three sons: Magno (I), Ulrich (II) [Odorico, Rigo), and Jacob.¹⁵ Ulrich (II) Tieffenbrucker was described as a “lute maker” in a 1567 document and had an instrument workshop in Venice called all’Albero verde (The Green Tree). Magno (I) had a workshop named all’Aquila negra (The Black Eagle) in Venice and produced three sons: Magno (II), Moisé, and Abraam. After the death of Magno (I), his two sons Magno (II) and Moisé ran The Black Eagle workshop.

The two brothers bought Abraam out of the family business because he seems to have been equally poorly suited at handling his personal finances as he was talented at attracting legal trouble. Although all three brothers were accused of Lutheran heresy by a servant in 1565, they were not subjected to any consequences at that time. Abraam, however, was again accused of Lutheran heresy by the Inquisition in 1575, and witnesses stated that he travelled regularly to “French lands” carrying several hundred ducats worth of lutes. This time Abraam was accused by the family of the painter Domenico Misani of marrying and abandoning Misani’s daughter. He appears to have went into hiding, and a Father Inquisitor charged with locating Abraam corresponded to the court of Venice in a letter about the matter:

With the great secrecy and diligence of which I am capable and in response to the orders given to me by your honor, I have looked and looked for Abraam lautarao but never found him. It is true, however, that 19 or 20 days ago someone alerted me of the presence of a lute player, not a maker, who trades lutes with Lyons and transports five or six hundred scudi of them there at a time. His name is Simonetto, a small and false man, and from what I hear he does not have a good reputation with regards to his faith. It could be him, the one about whom you have written me, having changed his name. In my opinion it would be better that you not only write his name, as you already did, but his features, where he comes from, and if he has family and where, because that is how we will find information about him. If he is the one you are looking for, we can arrest him on his way back from Lyons. I write this offering from my heart and I send back the [??] of your holiness according to your orders. Vicenza, August 6, 1575.¹⁶

Relying on this letter and other documentary evidence, Stefano Pio has argued that Abraam was using the identity of Simonetto, which he appropriated from the deceased trader of lutes known as Simone of Vicenza or Simone Cerdonis. While living, this Simone was both a commercial partner and a friend of the Tieffenbrucker family. According to Pio’s argument, then, Simonetto/Abraam was avoiding Venice by exporting lutes by land routes from Vincenza to Lyons, where he had family connections through his uncle Gaspard’s shop. Although Gaspard Duiffoprugcar had died in Lyons in 1571, his son Johann [Jean] continued to operate the workshop in Lyons from his father’s death until at least 1585.¹⁷ Another of Gaspard’s sons, also named Gaspard, moved to Paris upon the death of his father and established a workshop on rue Pot-de-Feu. If the two branches of the family maintained a working relationship, then it is probable that the Duiffoprugcars living in France imported instruments (or wholesale parts) from their Italian relatives and sold them in their shops.¹⁸

Pio has further discovered two Brescian documents that provide evidence suggesting that Simonetto/Abraam, while en route from Vicenza to Lyons, stopped in Brescia to purchase bowed string instruments from Gasparo da Salò. Both documents identify Simone dal Liuto as purchaser of two violins from Gasparo da Salò in 1580, five years after the letter between a Father Inquisitor and the court of Venice.¹⁹ Gasparo da Salò further lamented in 1588 that “my business does not go to France as usual” (. . . per non andar l’arte mia nella Franza secundo il solito . . .) suggesting that the death of Simone dal Liuto around 1580 interrupted this trade route of instruments between Brescia and France.²⁰ If it is true that Abraam Tieffenbrucker, in hiding from the Inquisition, adopted the name of his deceased lute-playing friend Simone dal Liuto, and if it is true that Abraam was the purchaser of bowed string instruments from the shop of Gasparo da Salò, then it is likely that Gaspard Duiffoprugcar (and after his death, his sons) sold Venetian lutes and Brescian bowed instruments in France. In a future blog post I will provide an overview of the extensive evidence of the circulation of Italian bowed string instruments in sixteenth-century France, but for now it will suffice to point out that inventories made after the death of Parisian facteurs d’instruments in the 1580s prove that Brescian bowed string instruments, especially violins, and Venetian lutes were sold in France.²¹ Comparing their appraised values to the values provided for domestic instruments in these inventories suggests that Italian stringed instruments were highly prized in sixteenth-century France.

The Peter Tourin/Thomas MacCracken list of extant historical viols lists twelve surviving viols attributed to Gasparo da Salò. The attribution of some of these instruments has been disputed. While many of these viols are hourglass- or guitar-shaped instruments, several are instruments with turned-out corners, like most depictions of French Renaissance viols.²² Other Brescian instrument builders of the sixteenth-century also produced viols with turned-out corners (See this previous blog post about Micheli viols). The instrument attributed to Gasparo da Salò in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University (pictured below), for example, has turned-out corners.

da-salo-bass-viol-grey-wa_1939_22-a-s — *Gasparo Bertolotti ‘da Salò’ viol, possibly bass, c. 1580 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford*

John Pringle made technical drawings of this instrument in 1979. It has a carved central integral bass bar and lacks a soundpost plate, suggesting it did not originally have a soundpost. The soundholes are reminiscent of those on a five-string French viol depicted by Jacques Cellier for Françoys Merlin sometime between 1583 and 1585:

BnF, ms. fr. 9152, fol. 175, “Recherches de plusieurs singularités, par Françoys MERLIN, controlleur général de la maison de feu madame Marie-Élizabeth, fille unique de feu roy Charles dernier,… portraictes et escrites par Jacques Cellier, demourant à Reims.” (1583–1587)

Françoys Merlin was the controlleur général of house of the recently deceased Marie-Élizabeth of France, the daughter of Charles IX.

While many lutes attributed to the Tieffenbrucker family survive, only three viols attributed to Gaspard Duiffoprugcar have survived, and all three have been discredited. One of these instruments is known as the “Plan de Paris,” or “Map of Paris,” viol, which is today part of the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Brussels.

“Plan de Paris” viol in the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Brussels

The “Plan de Paris” viol was purchased by Victor Mahillon for the collection of the Brussels Conservatoire from a M. Depret of Nice in 1889. Luthier and restorer Shem Mackey, in a recent article in Early Music, has offered convincing evidence that “the shape and construction details of this viol place it firmly in the second half of the 1600s and within the French/English style of making.” He further argued that “There is no doubt that the greater portion of this viol was made by Michel Colichon.”²³ Despite his attribution, Mackey concedes that “The general layout and design of this pegbox would suggest that it may have originally belonged to a five-string viol.”²⁴

The two other viols attributed to Duiffoprugcar also both have similar elaborate ornamentation. One of these instruments in the Hague and the other in a private collection.

Mackey argues that while “the similarity of the marquetry and carvings might suggest a similar origin,” “the same cannot be said of the instruments themselves.” He posits the existence of now-lost additional decorated viols and asks: “Is it likely that all three were acquired and/or constructed with a view to creating a set of instruments united through decoration, using them as a canvas?”²⁵

Are any parts of any of these viols therefore related in any way to Gaspard Duiffoprugcar? At this time it remains impossible to state with certainty. The “Plan de Paris” viol includes a handwritten inscription on the back: “This viola da gamba was made by Duiffoprugcar in Paris in 1515 and belonged to François I. By Dr. de Chox de Fayolle. 1830” followed by the signature of the nineteenth-century French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.²⁶ The inscription in pencil is difficult to read today and Mackey relies on an exhibition catalog. I believe it more likely reads “Drs. Choren and Fayolle,” the authors of the nineteenth-century dictionary entry on Duiffoprugcar that began this essay. It became fashionable in the nineteenth century for French luthiers like Vuillaume to put false labels in violins reading “Gaspard Duiffoprugcar,” some of whom even carved a scroll in his likeness based on the bearded engraving produced in the sixteenth century. While none of these three viols are examples of the craftsmanship of Duiffoprugcar, perhaps the originally five-string peg-box of the “Plan de Paris” viol was repurposed by Michel Colichon sometime between c. 1683 and 1693 from a dilapidated viol by Duiffoprugcar. Mackay, while creating an eloquent argument for Collichon’s involvement in the construction of this viol, still admits that the instrument is “without question, a composite.”²⁷ While the answers we seek elude us, they nevertheless remain important modes of inquiry. These three viols are the only extant viols that were at one point attributed to Gaspard Duiffoprugcar. If any of their parts were created by Duiffoprugcar, they would represent the only surviving components of historical viols created in sixteenth-century France. Then again, perhaps these “French” viols were imported Italian instruments made by a Bavarian family network.

Gaspard Duiffoprugcar and French Renaissance Viols

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Published by John Romey

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