NANINO, GIOVANNI MARIA. — Musician, born in Tivoli in 1545, died in Rome on 12 March 1607. He was buried in S. Luigi dei Francesi. He studied under the guidance of Pierluigi da Palestrina, whom he succeeded in 1541 as chapel master at S. Maria Maggiore. He relinquished this position in 1575 and went on to direct the musical chapel of S. Luigi de' Francesi in Rome, which he left in October 1577 to join the choir of the Sistine Chapel; he became its pro tempore director in 1604–1605.
At his music school, the first opened in Rome by an Italian, his brother Giovanni Bernardino, Gregorio Allegri, Antonio Cifra, Antonio Brunelli, Pier Francesco Valentini, Romano Micheli, and others were trained through lessons given by him and by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
In his works, from the printed collections of motets for 3 and 5 voices (1578–79–86) to the Psalms for 8 voices, one can observe the entire arc of that polyphonic art which illustrated the glorious Roman sixteenth century: from the early works, in which he shuns the solid contrapuntal construction of the severe traditional style, to the later ones, in which the decadence that would be complete at the end of the century is already beginning to appear. Among the motets, the Haec dies for 5 voices and the one for 6 voices, Hodie noble, stand out; the latter is still performed today by the Sistine Chapel on Christmas morning. Among his other works, the Mass Vestiva i colli for 5 voices (manuscript in the Sistine Chapel) and the 5 Lamentazioni for 4 voices (edited by Haber in the Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrb. of 1891) are especially noteworthy; to these may be added the Miserere published by Proske in his Musica Divina. The genre in which he was particularly successful, however, was the madrigal, in which he is said to have surpassed even Palestrina himself: numerous reprints of these works were produced, confirming their form and success. As a theorist, he left didactic treatises: Centocinquantasette contrappunti e canoni a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 e 11 voci sopra il canto fermo, intitolato la base di Costanzo Festa, highly praised (manuscript in the Bibl. Corsini, Rome); Rudimenti e regole di contrappunto, e Regole di contrappunto doppio a 4 e 5 voci, thereby gathering together that vast body of knowledge which was to constitute the primary source from which the new generation of musicians, formed under his and Palestrina’s valuable instruction, drew.
Many of his works were published in editions of the period, but many others are still unpublished in the collections of the Giulia and Sistine Chapels in the Bibl. Vaticana, in the Archive of the Chapel of S. Giovanni in Laterano, in the Bibl. Casanatense of Rome, and in Bologna, Munich, Münster, and Vienna.
GIOVANNI, younger brother of the preceding, born at Vallerano (Viterbo) around 1560, died in Rome in 1623, studied at his school. He too was chapel master at S. Luigi de' Francesi, from 1591, and subsequently at S. Lorenzo in Damaso. He excelled in the madrigal, a form to which he devoted three books of compositions, but, more than his brother, he cultivated sacred music, publishing 5 volumes of motets, one of Salmi vespertini a 4 voci for Sundays, and other minor compositions (invitatories, antiphons, responsories, etc.). Proske published 4 psalms for 4 voices in his Musica Divina. Many works are preserved in manuscript in Vienna and in other European libraries.