Musical comments on the figure of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez

Translation: Josephine Watson

Between the years 1599 and 1636, Francisco Correa de Arauxo (1576–1654) was the official organist of the El Salvador church in Seville, city in which Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660) was born and educated. Velázquez, whose paternal grandfather was from Porto, Portugal, and whose mother was a member of the Sevillian nobility, was to become one of the most universal painters in the history of art. Despite the fact that Correa’s tientos originally pertain to organ-related literature, they present a concertato character of clearly defined musical parts that favour its rendering in chamber ensembles. Correas’s music, characterised by a great compositional and instrumental virtuosity, displays the stylistic evolution of a transitional period between Mannerism and the Baroque. The author’s fantasy rests on an expressive realism such as the one we are able to observe in the works of the painter’s Sevillian period, when in a “naturalist” manner, he subjects both figures and objects to an intense light that throws volumes and shapes into relief. Correa may have visited at some stage the studio of Francisco Pacheco, where Velázquez worked as an apprentice between the years 1610 and 1617, after having spent a brief period in the school of Herrera the Elder. The workshop of Pacheco – cultivated painter whose daugther Juana the brilliant disciple would marry in 1618 – became a meeting-place for Sevillian intellectuals of the period, like the “academies” that where to be so important in the evolution of art. It is certainly likely that Velázquez was able to hear Correa’s music on accasion of some religious service, or while stopping at El Salvador during one of his frequent strolls. With a population of aproximately 150.000 inhabitants, Seville was at the time the largest and most populated city in Spain, and undoubtely one of the most cosmopolitan and important towns in Europe, for it held the monopoly of trade with America, attracting merchants from a number of countries and nationalities, especially Flemisch and Genoese, who established their offices there. Among Velázquez’ Sevillian works, alongside most part of the religious painting he would carry out throughout his lifetime, it is important to single out works such as El Aguador de Sevilla [Waterseller of Seville], Mujer friendo huevos [Old Woman Cooking Egs], Dos jóvenes comiendo [Two Youths Eating] and Los tres músicos [The Three Musicians].

Following the death of Philip III in 1621, Philip IV succeeded him, naming Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, Count of Olivares, his royal favourite. In 1622, asserting his contacts amidst the new circles of influence inside the court – for Olivares was a member of the Guzmán family, of maximum importance in Sevillian nobility – Pacheco favoured his son-in-law and disciple’s first visit to the court in Madrid. Upon his arrival, Velázquez had his first occasion to visit the royals collections of painting, and to paint the portrait of the poet Luis de Góngora. The following year he would travel to Madrid again, thanks to the mediation of the royal chaplain, Juan de Fonseca, who had previously been a canon in Seville. After having depicted Fonseca in a canvas admired by the entire court, Velázquez was commissioned to paint the king’s own portrait; upon its completion, the portrait aroused wide acclaim, and shortly afterwards Velázquez was officially named painter to the king, a position he held during the rest of his life.

In 1623, Charles, the Prince of Wales – the futur Charles I of England – also travelled to Madrid, with the purpose of solving the problems that had arisen around his intention to marry his fiancé, Mary of Austria, the sister of Philip IV. The prince’s entourage included a viola musician, Henry Butler (?-ca.1652). As a result of the difficulty in reconciling two different religions, the main obstacle preventing the celebration of the wedding, the measures taken proved to no avail. Mary of Austria, who would subsequently sit for a portrait by Velázquez in Naples, finally became the wife of the futur emperor of Austria, and following quite a long sojourn in Spain, lodging at the House of the Seven Chimneys, the present seat of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the heir to the British trone decided to return to England. Despite having shown an interest in taking Velázquez with him (who had also painted his portrait), Charles departed alone. Butler, on the other hand, settled in the Spanish court for many years, remaining in the country until the year 1652 under the hispanicised name of Enrique Botelero, employed as a vihuela de arco musician, an instrument he would laso teach the king to play. According to a curious palace document drawn up in 1637 and quoted by Subirá, Butler was granted a costume worth 200 ducats, while those worn by Spanish musicians was only worth 90. Furthermore, in order to economise, there is a recomendation to lower its worth to 80 ducats, which is the value assigned to Velázquez’ costume in the same document. Our inspired painter certainly still had a long way to go before occupyimg the position of usher to the king’s chamber towards the end of his life, when he was also named Knight of the Order of Santiago. Botelero’s Sonata a dos [Sonata in two parts], preserved in various manuscripts, was originally conceived for violin, viola – in other words, the viola da gamba, known in Spain as the vihuela de arco – and basso continuo. Nevertheless, the version for recorder and bassoon, two habitual wind instruments in seventeenth-century musical practice, works remarkably well, and we have limited ourselves to effect a transposition from the original G minor tonality to that of D, in order to adapt the range of the new instruments.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Italy was no doubt the country that set the pattern for musical evolution, in which we may highlight the activities of Count Bardi’s Florentine camerata, where the new musical aesthetic of the Baroque would be discussed and etablish alongside the origin of opera, and the flourishing of musical life in cities such as Rome, Naples and Venice, the latter being characterised by its publishing activity of an intensity hitherto unknown. Italy also witnessed the birth and development of instrumental music, which became a powerful vehicle of expression of the new artistic trends. Velázquez travelled on two occasions at least to Italy, a country equally assumed the greatest importance in the history of painting. Despited being denied permission to travel to Italy in 1657, the two periods he did spend there – between 1629 and 1631, and from 1649 to 1651 – proved to be essential in his vital and artistic trajectory. Before travelling to that Hesperian region, he very likely came into contact with the art of Italian peninsula in his hometown, Seville, where he would have had occasion to glimpse works by Italian masters. At a later date he furthered his knowledge in this field during his first sojourn at the court in Madrid, visiting the collections of painting in Madrid and El Escorial, and subsequently through his detailed study of the royal collections, with their significant proportion of Flemish works, once he had been named painter to the king. His first stay in Italy therefore, may be regarded as a period devoted to research, during which he visited the cities of Genoa, Milan and especially Venice, the main objective of the first part of his journey. He travelled as a member of the entourage of the Genoese Ambrosio Spinola, Marquis of the Balbases, who four years before had led the siege that concluded with the rendering of Breda and would later be immortalised by Velázquez in the famous painting celebrating the feat. Following his indepth study of Venetian masters, whose compositional harmony and treatment of light and colour represented his aesthetic ideal, Velázquez visited Rome, where he studied the Vatican collections, copied works by Raphael and Michelangelo, resided briefly at the Villa Medici, owned by the French ambassador the Duke of Toscana, and painted a number of new works. Towards the end of 1630 Velázquez also travelled to Naples, in order to paint the portrait of Mary of Austria on her way to meet her cousin and husband Ferdinand III, Emperor of Austria, to whom she had been married by proxy the previous year. Velázquez’ second sojourn in Italy took place twenty years later, when his style had matured and he had been commissioned to adquire works of art for the royal Spanish collection, and to engage Italian fresco painters to decorate the royal palace in Madrid. On this second journey, in addition to Florence he visited the same cities as on his first trip, including Naples and Rome, where he spent the whole of 1650 and painted the portrait of pope Innocent X, one of his most impressive works.

Velázquez probably did not have the opportunity of meeting Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), who had left Rome to settle in the court in Florence precisely between 1628 and 1643, year in which he returned to Rome to take up the position of organist in St. Peter’s basilica, the most important musical post in Christendom which he had first occupied in 1608 and where he would remain until his death. In spite of this, we have considered it important to include two of his works in our programme, for Frescobaldi was a central figure in the development of the music of his age. These pieces are representative of his Roman production, made in the setting of the Vatican, where Velázquez, as the painter of the Spanish king, enjoyed a special permit in order to carry out his studies. While the Toccate represent his revolutionary contribution to instrumental music – and had great repercussion due to the author’s fame throughout Europe, as well as that of his disciples, including Froberger – the Canzone for instruments, created in 1628, are considered more conservative in style. A parallel may be established between these pieces and the pictures La fragua de Vulcano [Forge of Vulcan] and La túnica de José [Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob] painted by Velázquez in Rome two years later, apparently at the residence of the Count of Monterrey, the Spanish ambassador in Rome. Some scholars consider these paintings as the most academic of Velázquez’ production, surely influenced by the artistic environment of Rome, which at the time exuded a form of classicism that combined the search of the beauty of antiquity, such as appears in the school of Guido Reni, with the Venetian influence our painter had just received.

In the first half of the seventeenth century Venice possesed a solid tradition of instrumental music, established one century before around the activity of St. Mark’;s cathedral and its chapel masters and instrumentalists, and it was at the time the most important centre in Europe as regards the edition of instrumental works. The two pieces by Dario Castello (¿-?) we have chosen for our programme are representative of this art, analogous to the luminous pictorial production so highly appreciated by our painter. Around the year 1600, a first generation of organist composers was active in the city, who treated instrumental chamber music in the transitional style between that of the previous century – governed by the significant figure of Giovanni Gabrieli, just as in the realm of painting, and especially in relation to the Velázquez influence, Titian and Tintoretto played essential rôles – and that of subsequet generation, of which Castello was a member, where string or wind instrumentalist composers were typical figures. With regard to the relationship between instrumental music and painting and its tradition in Venice, we should like to mention the curious case of the work The Marriage at Cana painted by Veronese in the second half of the sixteenth century, in which he portrayed the most important painters of the city of the lagoon in the guise of a musical quartet: Titian playing a double bass, Tintoretto playing a viola, Bassano playing a flute, and Veronese himself playing a violoncello. Although we currently have very little information regarding Dario Castello, “conductor of wind instruments in Venice”, we may assume that his music enjoyed great popularity, both within and without the borders of the Republic, taking into account the numerous reissues of his primo and secondo books between the years 1629 and 1658, when an edition appeared in Antwerp. His oeuvre has often been classified in the sphere of musical Mannerism, perhaps due to the fact that it represents a “twist” in relationmto the ideal outlines of the Renaissance, much like the figura serpentinata that began to appear in Italian art after Michelangelo, with the aim of favouring terribilitá. Another reason for this classification lies in the musical technique the work shares with the previous period, technique in which the strong tonal structure forming the basis of the High Baroque has still to crystallise yet, which also presents a certain spirit of investigation, searching forms appropiate to sustain the musical discourse of the new age. Nevertheless, we are of the opinion that his instrumental work – in stil moderno, as its title specifies – could perfectly well be considered Baroque. The aesthetic premises that enliven it are primarely concerned with the “expression of affections” typical of the period, producing an exacerbated realism that emphatically seeks to give way to expressiveness, as shown in Italy by the naturalist painting of Caravaggio.

Bartolomé Selma y Salaverde (c.1580/90?–a.1638) belonged to a family whose members, after having performed duties related to music in cathedral of Cuenca, settled in Madrid where they worked in the Royal Chapel in charge of the maintenance of instruments, and occupying positions as minstrels. Bartolomé – who we could call “the Younger”, taking into account that there is documentary evidence of another member of the family of the same name, presumably his father, in the capital at the onset of the seventeenth century – very likely received his training in Madrid, where he belonged to the Augustinian order. He also traveled abroad, and was employed as a bassoonist at the court of Archduke Leopold of Austria in Innsbruck, and possibly at other Central European courts. His Canzoni, fantasie et correnti..., published in Venice in 1638, constitute one of the few works by Spanish composers preserved within the repertoire of instrumental chanmber music of the age. While these are inscribed within the stylistic trend prevailing in Italian musical production – the term canzona or canzon da sonare has a very similar meaning in this period to that of sonata – it is interesting to trace certain features of this music that denote the provenance of its author, who may have coincided with our painter in the palace environment during his period of musical training. His fantasias for bass include the first works in the history of music devoted specifically to the bassoon, an instrument refered to in Spanish at the time as bajón. With regards to Selma’s dance music included in our programme we may say that it illustrates the elegant style such repertoires acquired during the second third of the seventeenth century. No doubt in the age of Velázquez dance fulfilled a very important social and artistic function, although in the musical parallelism we wish to trace with the painter’s biography, and with the pictorial essence of an oeuvre that Luca Giordano described as a “theology of painting”, we have preferred not to place emphasis on this aspect of instrumental music. On the other hand, it is important to note that for several decades following the plague of 1630, dance music was not socially accepted in Venice, an issue that was important enough to be reflected in the by-laws of the city.

Velázquez’ relationhip with the Low Countries had its origin in his early familiarisation with Flemish painting in Seville, an influence which can be perceived in the paintings we have mentioned from his first period, as in La mulata [The Mulatto Girl] and Cristo en casa de Marta [Christ in the House of Martha and Mary], where he favours the still life, a genre that flourished in Flemish painting. Moreover, a fundamental moment in Velázquez’ biography was the visit made by Peter Paul Rubens to Madrid in 1628, sent on a diplomatic mission by Isabella Clara Eugenia, aunt of Philip IV and governor of Flanders. Once his negotiations had been completed, Rubens, who had visited Spain previously when the court of Philip III was in Valladolid, spent eight month in the capital. Velázquez, who at the time occupied the post of usher to the king’s chamber, acted as Rubens’ cicerone, accompanying him on his visit to El Escorial, and also had the opportunity to watch him at work, for the Flemisch artist painted a number of canvases during his stay at the palace. Both conversed extensely, not only on the subject of painting but also on issues relating to the condition of artist, and Velázquez witnessed Rubens’ growing celebrity at a time when he was welcomed in different courts, receiving a treatment similar to that of an ambassador. As his own oeuvre evolved, Velázquez himself was gradually promoted in palace positions, until attaining the important post of principal usher to the king’s chamber and receiving a nobility distiction at the end of his life. His connections with the nobility would be strengthened several generations later, via his daughter’s family, for she was to marry the painter Martínez del Mazo and his greatgranddaughter would later marry an Austrian count, subsequently connected to the house of the Princes Hohenlohe-Lagembourgh. Present scholars believe Velázquez was related to the royal houses of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. Ruben’s visit to Spain also proved instrumental insofar as it prompted Velázquez to apply one year later for a license to travel to Italy for the first time, following Rubens’ mention of how important his own sojourn there had proved at the turn of the century. Some critics have spoken of Rubens’ influence in the work entitled El triunfo de Baco [The Triumph of Bacchus], also known as Los borrachos [The Topers], painted by Velázquez at the time, especially as regards the choice of mythological subject-matter, although we must point out that the work presents a very personal style. We have already mentioned the fact that on his first trip to Italy our painter coincided with Antonio de Spinola, a central figure in the painting La rendición de Breda [The Surrender of Breda], also known as Las Lanzas [The Lances], a canvas that depicts a scene in which the Genoese nobleman, against the backdrop of the smoky countryside of the Dutch war, submissively receives the keys of the city from its governor. This large-format canvas, a masterpiece painted by Velázquez in the decade of the thirties to decorate te Salón de Reinos of the newly-built Buen Retiro Palace, evokes the feat of the siege and surrender of Breda – which was also the plot of a theatrical piece by Calderón de la Barca – that took place in 1625 in the context of the Dutch wars of independence, concluding in 1648 with the Treaty of The Hague that acknowledged the independence of the Seven United Provinces of the north of the Low Countries.

In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia was also signed, putting an end to the Thirty Years War which had brought the main European powers into conflict and in which Spain also played a part, notably through the figure of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria. The brother of Philip IV, born in 1609, had been awarded the purple distinction of a cardinal at the age of ten, and was named lieutenant of Catalonia in 1632 and governor of Milan in 1633. The following year, Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria sent him to fight against the Swedes and their allies, at the head of an army of 18.000 men, at the battle of Nördlingen, where he obtained very good military results that led him to be appointed governor of Flanders, a position he occupied until his death in Brussels in 1641. Velázquez painted his portrait, with the Casa de Campo of Madrid in the background, for which he posed upright and in hunting dress, shotgun in hand and a hound by his side. This excellent painting was created with the intention that it form a part of the collection of real hunters that were to decorate the Hunting Salon of the Torre de la Parada, located on the Pardo mountains. In connection with the armed conflicts that marked the reign of Philip IV, we have deemed it interesting to include the “battle” by a Netherlander composer of the period. The “battle” is a musical piece of a descriptive genre, notably cultivated in repetoires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the later kwown as the “Iron Century” due to the profusion of armed conflicts it witnessed – particularly after Jannequin wrote his piece entitked La Guerre [The War] to commemorate the victory of Marignan in 1515. The piece Batali belongs to the book Der Fluyten Lust-hof [The Eden of the Flute], a collection of over one hundred and fifty pieces with variations for the recorder alone, written by Jacob van Eyck (ca. 1590-1657), a composer, carillonist and flautist who was extremely active in the city of Utrecht during the first half of the seventeenth century. It corresponds to the typical pattern of instrumental battle that transports us to a warlike atmosphere and relates, often in an onomatopeic manner, the evolution of such a conflict. We are able to distinguish the sound of trumpets and drums, military marches, calls to arms, shouts and soldier chants, hymns, exchanges of fire... In the centre of the piece we encounter the melody Wilhelmus van Nassau, the current national anthem of Holland, that commemorates the figure of Prince William of Orange-Nassau, initiator of the Dutch dinasty who would asume an important rôle in the wars of independence waged in the north of the Low Countries, until his assassination in 1584. Following other models of the time, our “battle” could have ended in either victory or retreat; however, it closed with the zeal of unfinished armed conflicts, for although it does allow a glimpse of hope, when the editor Paul Matthys published it in Amsterdam, with a dedication to the polititcian and music-lover Constantijn Huygens, the final establishment of Dutch independence was still two years away.

The oeuvre of Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667) represents an essential step forward in the evolution of the Baroque style. Froberger was one of the most widely travelled musicians of his age. Born in Stuttgart (Germany), he wrote the most important part of his work in Vienna, and worked at the service of the Austrian court intermittently throughout most of his life. During the period he was employed there, which probably began in 1634, he was awarded a grant to carry our studies with Frescobaldi in Rome between 1640 and 1641, and in 1649 he travelled there once again, before embarking on further journeys. From the 1647 he would be employed in Brussels by Archduke Leopold William, brother of the Austrian emperor and governor of Flanders for Spain, where he made friends with Constantijn Huygens, secretary of the Prince of Orange, who took upon himself to divulge his music in the Low Countries. In 1652 he travelled to Paris, where he held a very celebrated concert and had occsasion to meet the most relevant court musicians, such as Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, Gallot, Gaultier... Shortly afterwards he also visited Germany, and once again France and England, suffering a pirate attack on his voyage between Calais and Dover. Similarly, we must point out that the opening lamentation of our Suite responded to his need to console himself after having been robbed by soldiers as he crossed Lorraine on his way to Brussels, to serve Archduke Leopold, despite the fact that his passport was in order and bore the signature of the imperial authorities – est encore mieux que les soldats m’ont traicté he notes in the score. While in his toccatas, ricercares, canzoni and fantasie his music is closer to that of his Italian master whose style he contributed to divulge, he is much more innovative in his two books of suites, manuscripts dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand III, the husband of Mary of Austria. The suites in the second book, published posthumously in Amsterdam in 1698, present the four basic dances of all suites, even though Froberger places the gigue in second place instead of at the end, as would be habitual around the turn of the century. These dances may be regarded a consequence of the contribution of the main European nations: Germany for the allemande, which in our suite is replaced by the aforementioned lamentation, England for the gigue, France or Italy, according to whether the the corrente or courante be one type or another, and Spain for the sarabande. With regard to his relationhip with the Velasquian oeuvre, irrespective of the ties of the composer and his works with the world of the Austrias, we believe that the music of Froberger that we have selected appropiately despicts the last pictorial period of our inspired painter. In works such as La Venus del espejo [The Toilet of Venus, usually referred to in english as The Rokeby Venus], and La Meninas [The Maids of Honour], Velázquez plays subtly with ambiguity thanks to the presence of a mirror and its inverted reflection. La Venus del espejo also presents the same diffused brushstrokes and colours that transform his art into a genuine harmony between air and light, as those of Las Hilanderas [The Spinners], the fable of Pallas and Arachne in the guise of a sinple tapestry factory, in which Velázquez adds a musical note with the presence of a viola da gamba. Similarly, Froberger’s suite announces the arrival of the more refined and complex idiom of the High Baroque, which provided a richer and more fluent palette for musical expression, thanks to a stronger tonal system and to the permanent rhytmical influence of stylised dances that propiciated more successful and modulated musical phrases. Regarding the next episode, we could have also included in our programme a piece selected from the French court, perhaps by Chambonnières, the founder of the French Keyboard school. However, we shall merely point out that the French influence pervades the work of Froberger, a widely travelled musician who reconciled the most important stylistic trends of his age, contributing greatly to the internationalisation of the Baroque.

The encounter at Isla de los Faisanes would take place on the 7th of June of 1660, marking the end of the Velazquian biography. This island off the Bidasoa river, opposite Fuenterrabía on the border between France and Spain, was the setting of the ceremony at which Philip IV granted Louis XIV the hand of his daughter Maria Theresa in marriage, a historical circumstance that would lead to important consequences for Spain, for it subsequently enabled the house of the Bourbons to succeed in Spain to the dinasty of Austrias. At the same time, the Peace of Pyrenees was signed, putting an end to the recent wars with neighbouring France. Velázquez, as principal usher to the king’s chamber, was in charge of arranging the Spanish area of the pavilions where the encounter was to be held, as well as of organising the accommodation of the king of Spain and his entourage during the numerous stages of the solemn gathering on its journey to and from the Basque country border. This entailed two months of travelling and of exhausting work prior to the meeting, and a further return three-week journey in which he had to ensure that the means deployed for the event were succesfully withdrawn. While his outstanding participation in such a historical event represented the culmination of the artist’s aspirations in the Spanish court, the truth is that the fuss proved to be too great for a man of sixty-one, quite an age in those days. He returned to Madrid very tired, and one month later, following a brief feverish spell, he passed away. His wife, Pacheco’s daughter who had accompanied him silently all his life, took to her bed and died one week later.

However, to conclude our Velazquian musical journey we have preferred to travel back to the cheerful music of the Spanish viceroyal court of Naples, where in 1650 Andrea Falconiero (ca. 1585-1656) dedicated his work Canzone, fantasie... to Juan José de Austria, the same year precisely in which Velázquez visited the city again, at the height of his career and with the most definitive decade of his contributions to universal art still to come. Juan José de Austria was the illegitimate son of Philip IV and the actress María Calderón “la Calderona”. After having concerned himself in his education, and captivated by his talents and intelligence, he publicly recognised him and in 1642 conceded him the the distiction of great prior of the Order of San Juan, and in 1647 named him Prince of the Sea, supreme authority of the Spanish Armada. That very same year he was sent to Naples to suppress the revolt captained by the popular leader Tomas Aniello, known as “Masaniello”, during which the viceroyal palace was sacked. In Naples, where he was able to conquer the rebels and was consequently named viceroy of Sicily, Juan José de Austria seduced the daughter of the Valencian José Ribera, the notable painter who spent most of his life in the Parthenopean city. As a result of their relationship a daughter was born, who would later be sent to the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid. Don Juan José de Austria commissioned specially for his daughter the building of a chapel in the cloister of the convent, which was conscientiously decorated. Ribera, master of the chiaoscuro known in Italy as “lo Spagnoletto” who Velázquez visited on the two occasions he stayed in Naples in order to acquire his paintings for the royal collection, not only lost his daughter bust also his foremost model, whose beautiful figure we are able to trace in various works. Falconiero, a Neapolitan composer and lute player, remained very active in the music field throughout his life, and travelled widely to meet his professional commitments. A lute-player in Parma (1604), a musician in the court at Florence (1615), a chitarrone and chitarriglia alla spagnola instrumentalist in Modena (1620), in 1621 he set forth on a journey through Spain and France, and was in the service of Philip IV when our painter arrived in the spanish capital. There he would meet Botelero, to whom he dedicate one of his canzone. Employed once again as instrumentalist in Parma (1629) and as a music teacher in Genoa between the years 1632 and 1637, in 1639 he returned to his city of origin, initially as a lute player in the court’s Royal Chapel. In the year 1647 he succeeded Trabaci as Maestro de Capilla, a position he held until his death during the plague of 1656. Falconiero produced a wide range of compositional work, including villanelli, madrigals and motets, music for the Spanish guitar, as well as the work comprising the pieces of unmistakably Spanish titles that close our programme. The carefree flavour of his writing is charasteristic of the atmosphere reigning in the viceroyal court. He often employed a descriptive style, as in the “battle”, the virtual character of which he allegorically located in the court of Satan, alongside the typical imitative techniques of instrumental chamber music of the first half of the seventeenth century, as in the canzona dedicated to the Serenissimo Don Juan, while in the “folías” dedicated to “Doña Tarolilla de Carallenos” he applied the form that constitutes one of the most significant Iberian contributions to Baroque music.