(d Venice, before 23 July 1526). French singer. He appears on the first extant list of singers at S Marco, Venice, which dates from April 1486. On 31 August 1491 he was named maestro di cappella of the basilica, with responsibility for teaching the choirboys, a position he held until his death, although ill-health forced him to relinquish his duties to Pietro Lupato in October 1525. He was admired as a singer by Pietro Contarini of Venice, who called him a Frenchman (Argo vulgare, 1541). In 1502 the Venetian humanist Angelo Gabrieli, noting his fame not just in the art of music, praised his singing of a composition (or poem) written by Giovanni Armonio on the occasion of Anne of Foix-Candale’s visit to Venice on her way to become Queen of Hungary. If Fossis was a composer, no works exist to prove it. He left his books to the monastery of S Salvatore, Venice; two of them, collections of music treatises, are now in I-PAVu 361 and 450.
CaffiS
G.M. Ongaro: The Chapel of St Mark’s at the Time of Adrian Willaert (1527–1562): a Documentary Study (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1986), chaps. 2–3
G.M. Ongaro: ‘Willaert, Gritti e Luppato: miti e realtà’, Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 55–70
BONNIE J. BLACKBURN