Ars nova

A cura di Antonio Calvia e Maria Sofia Lannutti.
Gran parte del patrimonio musicale del Trecento italiano
resta tuttora accessibile in edizioni complessive ormai obsolete, in cui i testi poetici, talvolta di notevole livello, figurano metricamente e linguisticamente scorretti e spesso privi di senso, e l’interpretazione dei testi musicali riflette, con esiti discontinui, lo stato degli studi e dei metodi ecdotici di mezzo secolo fa. Per far fronte a questa lacuna, un gruppo costituito da
musicologi e letterati, legati al Dipartimento di Musicologia
e Beni Culturali di Cremona (Università di Pavia) e alla Fondazione Ezio Franceschini di Firenze, ha avviato il progetto «Polifonia italiana trecentesca» (PIT), con l’obiettivo primario di pubblicare una nuova edizione complessiva, propriamente critica, a cui si affiancano ricerche complementari sui generi e sul linguaggio musicale e poetico.
I saggi raccolti in questo volume, di carattere prevalentemente
metodologico, tutti con importanti novità, rappresentano i primi risultati delle ricerche in corso, che sono stati discussi in occasione di un seminario internazionale tenutosi a Firenze il 2 e il 3 dicembre del 2013. Riguardano la nozione di “poesia per musica”, la tradizione manoscritta dei testi poetici, la loro attribuzione e interpretazione (Lauren Jennings, Davide Checchi,
Maria Sofia Lannutti); l’analisi delle intonazioni anche in funzione dei problemi di datazione e ambientazione (Maria Caraci Vela); l’opera di Nicolò del Preposto, polifonista di grande interesse ma poco studiato, punto di partenza per una riflessione sulle strutture formali, sulle soluzioni compositive e sull’organizzazione dello spazio sonoro (Antonio Calvia, Daniele Sabaino, Marco Mangani); i criteri di trascrizione della notazione
antica in sede di edizione (Michele Epifani). In Appendice,
una nuova edizione dei madrigali La fiera testa che d’uman si ciba, nelle due intonazioni di Bartolino da Padova e Nicolò del Preposto, e La douce çere d’un fier animal, nell’unica intonazione di Bartolino da Padova.

In recent decades, the historical significance of the panel paintings by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and the Flémalle group has been subject to debate. This essay analyses the shifts in gilding practices that accompanied the introduction of the fifteenth-century ars nova, arguing that the new panel painting marked a self-conscious departure from the luxury arts by asserting its value through representation alone, rather than through material worth. From the 1420s-30s onwards, Netherlandish panel paintings rejected gold-leaf backgrounds, and they also increasingly either relegated gilding to small details such as halos and heavenly rays, or incorporated it into pictorial representation. In addition, these paintings display a particularly intensive visual dialogue with contemporary sculpture and brocaded textiles, as a means of exploring painting’s superior capacity to depict persuasive surfaces in spatial depth.

In establishing its independence from other contemporary art forms, and in promoting the intrinsic value of representation, early Netherlandish panel painting presaged the high status of painting in the ensuing centuries of the western canon, even though, in other respects, these works remained firmly rooted in earlier tradition. The rise of early Netherlandish painting thus sheds important light on the role of periodization within art-historical interpretation. Where a number of recent studies have perceived temporal instability within the content of medieval and Renaissance images, this essay proposes that historiographical assessment should take into account the specific material and conceptual qualities of different artistic media, and weigh the relative importance of their perceived references forwards and back in time.

The research for this project developed over many years and eventually coalesced into a size and shape in between a typical book and a typical journal article. Digital publication on the University of York’s History of Art Research Portal enables this essay to be presented at its full length, incorporating far more material—especially a greater number of detailed illustrations—than is possible in traditional printed journals. Publication at full length also enables it to combine typically disparate methodologies and sub-fields: historiography, methodological reflection, technical analysis, and close looking at artworks in different media, from luxury objects and sculpture to panel painting. Most critically, the visual apparatus of digital publication supports this essay’s emphasis on the importance of contingent looking within particular lighting circumstances, a feature rarely considered in art-historical studies.

Of the medieval music manuscript discoveries of the recent past, one of the most unexpected and intriguing has been the palimpsest volume discovered at the church of San Lorenzo in Florence in the early 1980s. Manuscript 2211 of the church of San Lorenzo now bears the title “Campione de Beni del 1504” and details the acquisition and rental of properties up to and beyond that date. Interest in the San Lorenzo Palimpsest stems from the fact that all of its present 111 parchment leaves reveal traces of its original function: in the first decades of the Quattrocento the volume was compiled as a sizeable collection of ars nova and early fifteenth-century polyphony. Many decades later, the music manuscript was unbound, its leaves scraped clean of music and text, and then most of the source was assembled and bound as it began its reincarnation as an administrative ledger. The use of multispectral imaging has produced previously unimaginable results in going well beyond what had been possible, allowing for outstanding visibility in the final enhanced published images.

This two-volume publication, including an introductory study and pseudo-color images, constitutes the virtual recovery of a lost codex, offering readings of its original musical content that make possible further scholarly study.
The music collection contains more than 200 songs, among them those of known Trecento composers such as Jacopo da Bologna, Francesco Landini, Paolo da Firenze, and Antonio Zacara da Teramo. Most interestingly, it includes previously unknown music by the Florentines Giovanni and Piero Mazzuoli and the theorist Ugolino da Orvieto, allowing scholars a fresh examination of music in Florence in the decades surrounding the year 1400. Remarkable is the inclusion of transalpine songs and a collection of motets, which may have made their way to Florence from the Councils of Pisa and Constance and the francophile courts of Pavia and Padova.
This large repertory of anonymous virelais, rondeaux, and ballades, as well as songs by Guillaume de Machaut and his contemporaries, concords with collections from northern Italy, Austria, Germany, and other international centers) in a pattern of dissemination outlined by Reinhard Strohm and others. With its newly visible contents, the San Lorenzo Palimpsest informs us of the way an era of Italian music-making was drawing to a close, telescoping with interest in the art of an international French style. The impetus for the assemblage of such a collection, in the absence of a scholarly university tradition or courtly milieu, seems to have been the continued expression of Florentine pride in native Italian polyphonic composition joined with the cultivation of some of the most cosmopolitan repertory available.