The manuscript Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale
Marciana, Latini, Cl. VIII.85 is a collection principally of music
theory treatises copied in and near Mantova in 1463-64.[1] It has served as the source for critical
editions of five texts (see
Appendix A), three of them of great importance. The
Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua was the seminal Italian
treatise on mode of the later Middle Ages and laid the groundwork
for the Renaissance theory of modes in plainchant and
polyphony;[2] the Ars practica
mensurabilis cantus secundum Iohannem de Muris (formerly known
as the Libellus cantus mensurabilis) provided the first
complete codification of the system of rhythmic notation that was
to prevail till the end of the Renaissance. The Liber de
proportionibus of Johannes Ciconia is one of very few medieval
treatises known to have been written by a major composer.
Though the importance of the “big”
treatises in the manuscript is unquestionable, several shorter
texts are of considerable interest: six works on counterpoint
(items 5a, 5b, 10, 14, and 18) and two on the theory of accidentals
(5c and 18). Counterpoint and accidentals converge in item 18, the
intriguingly titled Tercius liber musice, which expounds the
teoria del grado, a type of counterpoint that considers how
the notes of one hexachord harmonize with those of the same or
another hexachord.[3] Traditional
theory used seven hexachords built on Cs, Gs, and Fs, which involve
only the natural notes plus B flats. The Tercius liber
provides an additional ten hexachords, coniunctae, built on
B flat, D, A, E, B natural, and F sharp; they add to this scale E
flats plus sharps on F, C, G, D, and A. Treatises on
coniunctae are rare; very few of them go as far in the sharp
direction as this one (the treatment of coniunctae in the
Berkeley Treatise, by contrast, includes hexachords built on B
flat, E flat, D, and A, and thus uses, in addition to flats on B,
E, and A, sharps only on F and C).[4]
But what really sets the Tercius liber apart from any other
coniunctae treatise I know is that it shows how to make
counterpoint in those remote hexachords.[5]
Not surprisingly, there are almost twenty works of
scholarship, aside from the editions, that deal with Marciana
VIII.85; see
Appendix B. Yet despite so much attention, little is known
about the manuscript itself, primarily because we who studied it
each focused on one treatise or another, and considered the whole
only as a container for that text. Scholars disagree on the number
of scribes who worked on it; the author of one of the texts it
transmits has consistently been misidentified; nor has the identity
been established of the person in whose house at least a part of
the manuscript is known, and has been known, to have been copied
since the manuscript was first catalogued by Valentinelli in 1872.
During a sabbatical in Venezia I had the chance to examine the
manuscript in detail, and I’m now able to propose answers to
these questions.
Among aspects of the manuscript ignored in every
published description—including, regretfully, that in my own
edition of Marchetto’s Lucidarium—is its
construction, a matter considered de rigueur in most
branches of codicology. The manuscript consists at present of 91
paper leaves gathered in nine fascicles comprising five libelli (as
I use the terms here, a fascicle is a collection of bifolios folded
together—thus one of the basic physical units of the
manuscript—and a libellus one or several fascicles treated as
a unit for copying). A catalogue of its contents, showing their
distribution among the fascicles and libelli, appears as
Appendix
C.
The first libellus begins on fol. 1v with the opening
chapters of Marchetto’s Lucidarium (item 1), preceded
by a caption (in red):
In festo virginis katherine et matris
sanctissime principiaui Mantue hunc tractatum. In nouembrio 25
currente die. Anno domini 1464.
On the feast of Catherine the Virgin and the
Most Holy Mother I began this treatise at Mantova on the 25th day
of November in the year of the Lord 1464.
This is the only date in the first libellus of the
manuscript; others appear in the second libellus, at the end of
items 2 and 3, dated respectively May and June 1464; and in the
fourth libellus, at the end of items 11 and 13, September and
October 1463—if Michaelmas was celebrated, as now, on 29
September. Thus of the libelli bearing dates, the fourth was copied
first, then the second, and finally the first.
The first libellus of the manuscript is copied on
thick paper of high quality, so that there is very little
bleedthrough; the writing block is uniformly marked off and ruled;
the scribe wrote a careful scholastic book hand; chapter captions
appear in red, as do staff lines in musical examples and labels in
diagrams; large red initials alternate with empty spaces that were
probably meant to have been supplied with initials in blue; names
of authorities cited in the text are written in the margins, these
marginal annotations underlined in red. Diagrams are drawn with
straightedge and compass; the paper still shows pinholes left by
the compass point.
Libellus 2 is copied on the same paper as libellus 1
(they have the same watermark, a Greek cross); and it is similarly
prepared and executed, though with not quite so much care. It opens
with the inscription “Michi Resera”; both Johannes Wolf
and Suzanne Clercx-Lejeune took this as the name of the scribe,
and, as it recurs five more times in various parts of the
manuscript, declared that he had copied it in its entirety. But as
Pieter Fischer pointed out in his RISM inventory of Italian
manuscripts containing treatises on music theory (1968),
“Michi resera” is a prayer formula (“Open unto
me”) directed in this case to “B[eatae] I[mmaculatae]
V[irgini]”.[6] Fischer also
noted two sections of the manuscript that had been copied by other
scribes, the last page of libellus 1 (f. 10v, which presents an
excerpt from Marchetto’s Lucidarium, item
1b-c),[7] and the final three
folios of the manuscript (ff. 89r-91v, items 19, 20: a treatment of
the prolations, followed by a diagram of the hexachords, along with
miscellaneous notes). But Fischer overlooked the hand of item 6 (f.
61r), which opens libellus 3; as the words on this page have
nothing to do with music, he dismissed them (as was RISM’s
policy) with the words “Non agunt de
musica”—“They don’t deal with music
theory.”[8] Ellsworth,
accordingly, in the introduction to his edition of Ciconia’s
Liber de proportionibus, stated that this scribe “is
of little importance for us,” as he copied only one item,
“which does not concern music and is not an integral part of
the manuscript.”[9] As we’ll
see, the text on this page is not without its significance.
Libelli 3 and 4 continue in a hand that Ellsworth
called a “scholastic cursive hand but without the clarity and
precision of the first scribe.” These libelli certainly lack
the refinement of the first two. The paper is thin and poor in
quality; bleedthrough often makes it difficult to read the text,
even when working with the manuscript itself. The writing block is
unruled for the most part, and lines of text tend to stray across
the page. Initials are few, smaller than those of libelli 1 and 2,
and in the same dark brown ink as the text; the scribe seems to
have written them in as he went along. And when there are diagrams
they are done freehand.
Libelli 3 and 4 are so different in appearance from
libelli 1 and 2 that I worked with the manuscript for two months
before reaching the conclusion that, with the exception of eight
pages (ff. 10v, 61r, and 89r-91v; Items 1b-c, 6, 19, and
20—those enclosed in shaded fields in the contents list of
Appendix
C), the entire manuscript had, indeed, been copied by one
scribe. I began to suspect this was possible when I noticed that,
though the scribe of libelli 3 and 4 seldom wrote a beautiful hand,
he was capable of doing so: in the middle of the clumsily written
folio 62v, for instance, appear three words (Huc videlicet
graves) much more elegantly written than the rest. The
appearance of the unusual prayer formula “Michi resera”
in both libelli 2 and 4 suggests a single mind at work in both; a
number of letter forms that recur throughout the manuscript (e.g.,
a distinctive capital N with angular corners, a capital I decorated
with two dots vertically aligned, a g with the lower loop either
left open or jutting down sharply to the left), along with similar
marginal flourishes, suggest a single hand as well—as does
the use in every libellus of the same sign where words are broken
between one line and the next. Usually scribes use a pair of short
lines something like an equal sign in such cases; this scribe,
idiosyncratically, did not lift his pen between the two strokes, so
that the lines are connected, in a manner resembling the numeral 2.
This last bit of evidence I regard as particularly telling, as
signs like these are something a scribe would write without giving
them conscious attention.
If the scribe was capable of writing beautifully, why
did he not do so in libelli 3 and 4? Perhaps he lacked the time or
the materials to do a proper job, or perhaps even the models that
would have provided a worthy example for him to follow. If the
scribe’s circumstances had improved during the six months
intervening between the copying of libellus 4 and libellus 2, that
change might have given him access to better models and materials
and the time to use them properly.
Was libellus 3, which lacks any indications of date
or place of writing, copied at about the same time as libellus 4?
Their general similarity of appearance would suggest that it was.
And there is yet one other bit of evidence that ties the contents
of libelli 3 and 4 together: a number of the texts in both show
clear connections of one sort or another to the city of Mantova and
its environs. In libellus 4, item 12, the short text De vi et
laudibus musice bears a colophon stating, “Hec ex libro
francisci de robertis cuntis mantuani”—“these
things from a book of the Mantuan Franciscus de Robertis
Cuntis.” Item 13a, the discussion of music from
Isidore’s Etymologies, bears the colophon “Hec
Ysydorus sanctissimus ubi supra,” where ubi supra may
indicate that the scribe copied this text from the same book as the
preceding (it could be, on the other hand, that the words refer to
the place of copying given in the colophon of item 11). Item 11,
Ciconia’s De proportionibus, is transmitted in only
two other manuscripts, into one of which it was copied, also in
Mantova, just ten years after Marciana VIII.85.[10] Concerning
libellus 3, item 7, the Introductiones artis musice of
Nicolaus “AurItus” de Buccellanito, Bonnie Blackburn
has suggested that the “de Buccellanito” element may
refer to the Bizzolano quarter of Canneto sull’Oglio, just
west of Mantova.[11] I see no
such specifically local connections for the contents of libelli 1
or 2; the wider perspective in the contents of these parts of the
manuscript (which begin respectively with what are arguably the two
most important music theory treatises of the early fourteenth
century) would be consistent with the improvement in the
scribe’s circumstances I’ve hypothesized.
The contents of libelli 3 and 4 betray another trait
in common: an interest in matters pertaining to classical
antiquity, presumably on the part of the person for whom the
manuscript was copied. Item 12, De vi et laudibus musice, is
a florilegium drawn mainly from Boethius and Macrobius (though also
from Isidore, Marchetto, and Johannes de Muris). Item 13b, a note
written in the upper right margin of f. 78r that gives the names of
the muses and their meaning, is a gloss on the text of item 13a, an
excerpt from the Etymologies of Isidore, who here derives
musica from musae. (Parenthetically, I’ll note
that on this same page the scribe uses a marginal “No[ta]
b[e]n[e]” to call the reader’s attention to a
particular clause in Isidore’s text:
[…] eratque tam turpe Musicam nescire quam
litteras.
… and not to know music theory was as disgraceful as not to
know grammar.
Surely this scribe was aware that the person for
whom he was copying had an interest in learning and the arts.) Item
15 is a “Guidonian” hand—one example of what is
surely the most ubiquitous image in medieval music theory
manuscripts—but here with Greek note names replacing the
usual Latin ones, and with the names of the fingers given on the
palm of the hand in both Latin and Greek. The Greek note names
recall the practice of Nicolaus de Buccellanito in item 7, who
liked to use Greek names for the notes of the scale—in a
manner similar to that of Johannes Ciconia, from whom he seems to
have cribbed a good deal (Blackburn, “Buccellanito, Nicolaus
de”). Finally, item 16, on the last verso of libellus 4, is a
collection of rather elementary notes on various classical
subjects—like these:
Laodomia vxor fuit prothegilay qui interfectus
fuit primo ab hectore In bello troyano […]
Callimachus et philetus diu fuerunt poete qui elegos conscripserunt
[…]
Cos co uel coos coo declinatur et est insula in mari […]
Laodamia was the wife of Protesilaus, and he was
slain by Hector in the Trojan War.
Callimachus and Philetus were poets a long time ago, and they wrote
elegiac verses.
Cos is declined Cos, Co or Coos, Coo, and it
is an island in the sea.
This makes five items with classical allusions in
just two fascicles of the manuscript.
To them we can now add item 6, which has long been
regarded as the letter of a certain “Syrus” to his
friend Candidianus (this is the text RISM B III2
disregarded as not concerning music theory). Valentinelli, the
librarian who first catalogued the manuscript in 1872, called the
author “Syrus lugdunensis”—Syrus of Lyon—as
if he knew perfectly well who this person had been; others of us
who inventoried the manuscript followed his bad example.
Considerable searching, however, yielded no “Syrus”
likely to have been the author. He writes that he prefers “my
fogs of Lyon” to the sunshine of Rome, which he now suffers;
he berates his correspondent’s birthplace, Cesena, as
“an oven,” and his residence, Ravenna, as ridden with
mosquitoes and frogs, a place where the natural order has been so
perverted that “walls fall down and waters stand up, towers
float and ships are grounded, the sick walk and physicians lie in
bed, … clerics practise usury and Arabs sing the
psalms.”[12] While this last
pair of contraries reflects a Christian background, there is
nothing to indicate when the author might have lived. At any rate,
the reference to “my fogs of Lyon” makes it clear that
Valentinelli need not have known who the author was to characterize
him as “lugdunensis”; he could have deduced as much
from the letter itself. But even the name “Syrus” was a
confection of Valentinelli’s. What actually stands for the
writer’s name in the headline are the letters “S”
and “y” plus the hook that indicates a -us ending;
given the conventions of the time, the writer could be anyone whose
name begins with “Sy-“ (or “Si-“) and ends
with “-us.”
I am grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens of Oxford
for identifying the author: Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius, a Gaul,
married the daughter of Avitus, who became emperor in January 456.
Sidonius not only survived the coup that undid his father-in-law
eight months later, but delivered the panegyric for his successor,
Flavius Maiorianus. He was appointed prefect of the city of Rome in
468 and bishop of Clermont in 469; as such he saw the Auvergne
sacrificed in 474, by treaty, to the invading Goths in an attempt
to save Italy from them. He died around 480, and is an important
witness to the end of the Roman Empire.[13] The placement of
a letter of his at the front of the libellus that opens the oldest
portion of the manuscript attests yet again to an interest in
classical antiquity on the part of the person for whom it was
destined.[14]
For whom was the manuscript destined? The colophon of
item 11, Ciconia’s De proportionibus, f. 77r, states
that this part of the manuscript was “scriptum mantue in domo
strennui militis illustrisque uiri domini baltasaris de castello
leonis”—“written at Mantova, in the house of the
vigorous miles and illustrious gentleman, Lord Balthasar de
Castello Leonis)” (I leave miles untranslated, as it
can carry a range of meanings); the colophon was recorded by
Valentinelli and—again—reproduced by those of us who
have inventoried the manuscript, but without determining who this
person might have been. Actually, it is not difficult to render the
Latin name Balthasar de Castello Leonis into Italian: Baldassarre
Castiglione. The great humanist, author of Il libro del
cortegiano, was born in Mantova, but only in 1478—fifteen
years, inconveniently, after this portion of the manuscript had
been copied.
Two exceedingly rare histories of the Castiglione
family, however, both held by the Marciana,[15] report that the
Baldassarre Castiglione known to all students of Renaissance
culture was the namesake of his grandfather, “Baldassarre
Primo”; and they call Baldassarre Primo a miles, the
same honorific used for him in the colophon of item 11. It was he
in whose house at least libellus 4 was copied.
This Baldassarre Primo (1414-77) was the son of
Cristoforo (d. 1425), an eminent jurist of Milano, who had studied
law at Parma and later taught there. Giovanni Maria Visconti, Duke
of Milano, named Cristoforo Consigliere some time after 1402, and
the Emperor Sigismondo named him Conte and Cavaliere in 1414,
titles that were to pass to all his male descendants. Baldassarre
Primo, Cristoforo’s third son, was a favorite of Filippo
Maria Visconti, alongside whom he fought in battles against the
Aragonese and the Venetians; some time after 1444 Baldassarre Primo
accepted a call from Ludovico Gonzaga, second marquess of Mantova,
to become his vassal; he built a house at Mantova and married
Polisena Lisca, the daughter of a Veronese knight. Though
Baldassarre Primo had grown up in a learned household, he seems to
have become more a soldier than a scholar, and if the manuscript
was intended for him, that circumstance makes the presence of the
rather elementary notes on classical subjects at the end of
libellus 4 perhaps understandable.
I suggested earlier that the improvement in quality
of execution for libelli 1 and 2, copied in 1464, over that of
libelli 3 and 4, copied in 1463, might be explained by an
improvement in the scribe’s circumstances, and another bit of
information from one of the family histories suggests what this
change might have been. Clearly, the fourth libellus of the
manuscript (and with it probably the third) was copied in Mantova,
“in domo Baltasaris.” But the second libellus,
according to its colophons, was copied in Bozzolo, a village some
20 km from Mantova. Bozzolo, in 1435, had fallen to the ownership
of Ludovico Gonzaga by forfeit from Carlo degli Albertini, Count of
Prato (Beffa Negrini, 280). One might wonder whether in the six
months intervening between the copying of the two sections the
scribe left the patronage of Baldassarre for that of Ludovico. This
at present can be only conjecture; but under Ludovico’s
patronage the scribe would certainly have found better materials
and more splendid models than he had had access to under
Baldassarre’s. Ludovico was a product of the humanistic
school of Vittorino da Feltre; his learning, his wealth, and the
prodigality of his patronage are well attested. It was he who
called Andrea Mantegna to Mantova to paint the walls of his palaces
with the frescos that remain famous today.
Whatever the precise circumstances surrounding the
completion of Marciana VIII.85, it is clear that it originated in
the early 1460s in and around Mantova, and very close to the
corridors of power. By the end of the fifteenth century Mantova was
to become a leading musical center, especially after the marriage
of Ludovico’s grandson Francesco to Isabella d’Este in
1490. The musical life of Mantova in the 1460s, however, is poorly
documented,[16] so the contents
of Marciana VIII.85—including, of course, the treatise on how
to make counterpoint using the remote hexachords with all their
accidentals—provide a tantalizing glimpse into the musical
interests, tastes, and practices of the city during that
decade.
|
________________________
[Bio] Jan
Herlinger, Derryl and Helen Haymon Professor of Music at Louisiana
State University, has edited and translated treatises of Marchetto
da Padova and Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi, and recently
contributed a chapter to the Cambridge History of Western Music
Theory.
e-mail: janh@lsu.edu
[1] I thank Doctor
Giuliano Di Bacco, currently of Cambridge University, and Professor
Linda Page Cummins of the University of Alabama, who consulted
Latini VIII.85 at the Marciana and shared their insights; Mr
Leofranc Holford-Strevens of Oxford, who identified the text
numbered 6 in the manuscript description; Professor Richard Warga
of Louisiana State University for sharing his expertise on
paleographic matters; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for
generously funding the research that led to this work; and
Professoressa Maria Caraci Vela for the invitation to participate
in the IV. Seminario di Filologia Musicale: Esperienze di
Lavoro (Università degli Studi di Pavia, Facoltà di
Musicologia, Cremona) in May 2004, where I read a shorter version
of this paper.
[2] Harold S. Powers and
Frans Wiering, “Mode,” New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (London:
Macmillan, 2001), vol. 16, 791-95.
[3] On the teoria del
grado, Pier Paolo Scattolin, "La regola del 'grado' nella
teoria medievale del contrappunto," Rivista italiana di
musicologia 14 (1979):11-74.
[4] The Berkeley
Manuscript, University of California Music Library, MS 744
(olim Phillipps 4450): A New Critical Text and
Translation, ed. Oliver B. Ellsworth, Greek and Latin
Music Theory, 2 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1984), 52-67.
[5] For a representation
of the table of hexachords in the Tercius liber, see Karol
Berger, Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in
Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 35. I plan a future
study of the texts on counterpoint and coniunctae in the
manuscript.
[6] Pieter Fischer, ed.,
The Theory of Music from the Carolingian Era up to 1400, Volume
2: Italy, Répertoire international des sources musicales,
B III2 (München and Duisburg: Henle, 1968), 128-29.
See also Oliver B. Ellsworth, introduction to Johannes Ciconia,
“Nova musica” and “De proportionibus”:
New Critical Texts and Translations, ed. and trans. Oliver B.
Ellsworth, Greek and Latin Music Theory, 9 (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 39.
[7] This is the end of the
Lucidarium text in this libellus (another chapter appears as
item 17 in libellus 5), copied from the exact point were the
principal scribe had left off on f. 10r and continuing through the
words “Quoniam musica,” which open Lucidarium
2.10; thereafter this other scribe noted that three-fourths or
perhaps four-fifths of the Lucidarium text is missing.
[8] On the perils of this
pernicious practice, see Giuliano Di Bacco, “‘Non agunt
de musica’: alcune ricette quattrocentesche per la cura della
voce in due manoscritti di teoria musicale,” in
Trent’anni di ricerche musicologiche: Studi in onore di F.
Alberto Gallo, ed. Patrizia Dalla Vecchia and Donatella Restani
(Roma: Torre d’Orfeo, 1996), 291-304.
[9] Ellsworth,
introduction to Johannes Ciconia, “Nova musica” and
“De proportionibus,” 39.
[10] That is, into
the famous “Faenza Codex”: Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale
117, copied by Johannes Godendach (=Bonadies). For the colophon,
see Ellsworth, introduction to Johannes Ciconia, Liber de
proportionibus, 442, or Giuliano Di Bacco, De Muris e gli
altri: sulla tradizione di un trattato trecentesco di
contrappunto (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2001), 90.
[11] Bonnie J.
Blackburn, “Buccellanito, Nicolaus de,” The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 4,
529.
[12] Adapted from
Sidonius Apollinaris, Poems and Letters, ed. and trans. W.
B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1963-65), vol. 1, 380, 382.
[13] C. E. Stevens,
Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1979 [reprint of Oxford University Press, 1933]).
[14] The first folio
of the fascicle is missing. The traces of text visible on the verso
of the scrap that remains seem to be in the same hand as
Sidonius’ letter.
[15] Matteo
Castiglione, De origine, rebus gestis, ac privilegiis gentis
castilioneæ (Venezia, 1596), 25-27; Antonio Beffa Negrini,
Elogi historici di alcvni personaggi della famiglia
Castigliona (Mantova, 1606), 248-58, 275-85. The Marciana
copies of both books were once part of the library of Apostolo
Zeno.
[16] See Iain
Fenlon, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua, I,
Cambridge Studies in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), esp. chapter 1, "The Origins of Mantuan Renaissance
Culture."
|
|
|