Colonna di Fuco

Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1637-1695) was a native of Bologna and the music director of one of its major churches, dedicated to San Petronio, where he presided over a rich culture of sacred music distinguished by participation from names now far better known to us such as Torelli, Bononcini and Giovanni Gabrieli.

Harmonies of Devotion is both an exploration of the Italian motet repertory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and a celebration of the devotion to this sacred repertory displayed by English antiquarian collectors of the eighteenth century. Among the works recorded here for the first time are Giovanni Legrenzi’s six-voice masterpiece Intret in conspectu tuo, which survives thanks to a copy made in London by Handel, a five-voice Crucifixus by Legrenzi’s pupil Antonio Lotti, sent to London’s newly formed Academy of Ancient Music, a grand Marian motet written for the Academy by Agostino Steffani, and music by Steffani’s teacher Ercole Bernabei, again collected by members of London’s antiquarian music clubs.

The Renaissance master Raphael (1483–1520) painted the Colonna altarpiece circa 1504–05 for a convent in Perugia. It was subsequently owned by Queen Christina of Sweden, the duc d’Orlèans of France, and the Colonna family in Rome. In 1901, J. Pierpont Morgan acquired the altarpiece, which was still in a private collection, paying the phenomenal sum of two million francs. Morgan’s son bequeathed the painting to the Metropolitan Museum in 1916, and it remains one of the great treasures of the collection. …