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Early modern composers distinguished themselves from their predecessors by referring to their work as “modern”; these assertions of modernity reflect a growing historical consciousness—a desire to distinguish the present moment from the past. The clearest manifestation of such historical sense outside of music was in the ars historica of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Music, too, had its ars historica—the work of theorists and composers who sought to separate themselves from earlier traditions. Monteverdi’s seconda prattica (“second practice”) represents one example, but another lies in the purely instrumental works by Dario Castello, which he called Sonate concertate in stil moderno (Concerted sonatas in the modern style). Castello’s sonatas use the older genre of the canzona as a template, but depart from that genre in their application of distinctly modern techniques. These techniques are governed above all by the habitus of the performer, and Castello’s sonatas thus bring the performer’s physical, bodily sense to bear on the articulation of the modern style. These sonatas thus constitute an artisanal contribution to the ars historica.

This volume has presented a new way of understanding instrumental music in early modern Italy as a product of “instrumentality.” Such understandings open the way for further interpretations situated within a broad, inter-disciplinary perspective.

Theorists connected musical works with visual portraits, which preserved the memory of the subject for posterity. I argue for a new understanding of instrumental works with character-trait titles (e.g. “The Gracious One”) with portraits in other media, including Giambattista Marino’s poetic collection La galeria (“The [portrait] gallery”). Some pieces with character-trait titles are dance works, which may interpreted alongside the multi-media portraiture advocated by Fabritio Caroso’s dance manual Nobiltà di dame (1600). Other works with such titles are sonatas, which use the quickly changing idiom of the stile moderno to portray the affetti in a complex manner. Instruments of music functioned as instruments of portraiture, expressing the affetti of the subject as clearly as the painter’s brush.

Earlier understandings of instrumental music as an imitation of vocal music were complicated in the seventeenth century by a new aesthetic, which embraced artifice as much as the “natural.” Seicento theorists such as Giambattista Marino and Galileo Galilei inverted the hierarchy of vocal and instrumental music, arguing that instrumental music was more effective at arousing the affetti (emotions) of the listener. The stile moderno instrumental music of early seventeenth-century Italy explored an essential opposition between the material nature of instruments and the ephemerality of the emotions that they sought to represent and elicit. It was in consideration of this paradox that artists and artisans could arouse the sense of wonder so essential to the early modern aesthetic experience.

A need exists for a thorough reassessment of the revolutionary instrumental repertoire of early 17^th-century Italy. Rather than considering instrumental music on its own or in relation only to vocal music, this chapter argues for engagement with recent work on artisanship and technology in the history of science, literature, and visual art.