The End of the Ars Nova in Italy offers a collection of ten essays originally presented as papers at a conference convened in 2017 by the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini and the University of Pavia's Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage. Representing an array of methodologies in current musicology, each essay offers a reappraisal of the so-called San Lorenzo Palimpsest (hereafter SL).
Discovered by Frank d'Accone in 1983, SL contains 111 parchment leaves of music that were disbound and scraped clean to become a church record book in the early sixteenth century. Literally placing SL under new light, that of multispectral imaging, some 216 compositions—including previously unknown music—are now viewable; they were reproduced in Andreas Janke and John Nadás's The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, Ms. 2211 (2016). The title of the current volume evokes “a discontinuity in the manuscript tradition that coincides with the years of the resolution of the Schism” (viii). Its essays approach the challenging enterprise of Renaissance music historiography, presenting new possibilities for the study of ars nova music of the Italian Trecento.
Nearly half of the essays engage directly with the multispectral images of SL. The opening essay by Elena Abramov-van Rijk uses a sonnet by Franco Sacchetti to argue for a soundscape of Renaissance Florence, an approach that has gained traction in recent scholarship and one that demonstrates new potential directions within SL. John Nadás's archival work connects the composer Paolo da Firenze to Cardinal Angelo Acciaiuoli and the Benedictine book-making tradition of Badia Fiorentina, confirming hypotheses about his influential role as a compiler of music (31). Margaret Bent examines the ten motets in SL—the only known such grouping in a Trecento manuscript—while focusing attention on Hubertus de Salinis as the only non-Italian composer present in the manuscript.
Mikhail Lopatin makes a particularly novel contribution to our understanding of musico-metapoetic relationships. By utilizing two case studies from SL, Lopatin focuses on the semantic field established by metaphoric devices. By moving away from an understanding of metapoesis as a kind of self-reflexive poetic writing, he examines the use of the poetic lexicon to acknowledge its musical constriction (74). Together with the essays here presenting a new edition of realistic virelais by Davide Checchi and Michele Epifani, and a previously unknown Francesco Landini ballata in SL transcribed by Antonia Calvia, the editors have curated a trio of philological interpretations sure to stimulate readers.
Two intrepid contributors demonstrate contrasting yet equally compelling strategies for solving the longstanding problem of identifying composers in otherwise illegible or incomplete texts. Andreas Janke examines a section of music devoted to Donato da Firenze to hypothesize the possible identities of unattributed composers. Michael Cuthbert utilizes computational interval searching to recover damaged and incomplete text. His innovative approach argues convincingly for new tools to engage critically with musical sources.
Several scholarly avenues opened by this collection direct inquiry beyond Florence, presenting valuable opportunities for expanding the canon. Anne Stone's analysis connects some of the music in SL, namely that by Matteo da Perugia, with Milanese circles, describing this connection as an example of the “cross-fertilization” of French and Northern Italian composers (240). Likewise, Gianluca D'Agostino's essay directs attention to music in Naples where he argues lies the “real ‘end of the Ars Nova’” (285). Stone and D'Agostino provide useful bodies of evidence for further study on musical circulation that complicates this volume's title by questioning polyphonic practices and patronage in Florentine-dominated narratives.
While the editors acknowledge in their preface thematic and methodological connections among the essays, it is disappointing that they did not organize the book into thematic units. Such an editorial adjustment might have aided in reading its essays across disciplinary boundaries and provided context for the broader discourse to which each represents a powerful contribution. Nevertheless, the rigorous scholarship here opens up exciting directions for musicological research into the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and forges a new pathway for musical studies of the ars nova. Particularly noteworthy is the book's availability in open access format, encouraging a wider dissemination of pluralistic approaches to ars nova studies that include conversations with the fields of literature, philology, history, and iconography.
