Bernardo Pisano

In addition to singing in the papal chapel choir, he acquired ecclesiastical benefices from the Pope, including one each at the cathedrals of Seville and Lerida.

Pisano made the mistake of returning to Florence in 1529, during the three-year period of republican government, the result of a successful coup d'état against the Medici.

In 1546 Pope Paul III appointed him maestro di cappella of his private chapel, a position which he only held for two years, for he died in 1548.

While Pisano wrote sacred music in a sober, homophonic style, probably intended to be used during his tenure as maestro di cappella at Ss.

In 1520, Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci published his Musica di messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha, a collection of settings of Petrarch influenced by the literary theories of Pietro Bembo; while the pieces in the collection were not yet called "madrigals", they contained several features recognized in retrospect as distinctive of the genre: the set serious texts, the placement of words and accents was done carefully, and they contained word-painting.

[1] The slightly later composers who became famous masters of the madrigal genre — Costanzo Festa, Jacques Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot — were aware of his work and copied some of his stylistic traits.