This past June, at the Vatican Library, while examining three
fifteenth-century manuscripts containing copies of a musical treatise by the
composer and music theorist Ugolino of Orvieto (ca. 1390-1452), I discovered an
erased name on an otherwise blank page.[1]
Just as I was about to return one of the tomes to the Vatican Library’s
custodians, my eyes caught what at first appeared to be a mere smudge, then,
after much squinting and tracing, a barely visible letter or two, but after
several attempts to reconstruct these letters it remained complete nonsense.
Only after plucking up the courage to request from the librarians the ultraviolet
light apparatus, did I learn that it was indeed text, in fact the name of
another music theorist from the early fifteenth century, appearing upside down: "prosdocimo de bel domando padoano."
This erased name is found in a manuscript copy of Ugolino’s Declaratio that has long fascinated me,
and not only because it is a gloriously illuminated manuscript: Vatican City,
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms Rossiano 455 (I-Rvat Ross. 455). It is a
nearly complete copy of the treatise that was bound and illuminated before October
1453 in Ferrara, and has absolutely no surviving ascription to Ugolino in it. The
erasure appears on the back
(i.e., verso) of a blank flyleaf that opens the volume, preceding the stunning
frontispiece illuminated by the Ferrarese artist Giorgio
d'Alemagna.[2]
Image 1: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms Rossiano 455, fol. 1r; B/W facs. reproduction in Hans Tietze, Die
illuminierten Handschriften der Rossiana in Wien-Lainz (Leipzig,
1911), 127-130, plate V. Color facs. reproduction in Toniolo, La miniatura a Ferrara, 141-145. The
erased ascription is now facing this frontispiece.
![]() |
Image 2: Illumination by the artist Giorgio d’Alemagna in the Missal of Borso d’Este, Ferrara, 1457; http://www.wga.hu/art/g/giorgio/missal.jpg |
Now, who is this Ugolino? After
growing up in Forlì, Italy, he sang polyphonic music in the chapel of Pope Gregory
XII during the Schism, he attended the important ecumenical council in
Constance, he sang in Florence while the construction of Brunelleschi’s cupola
for the Duomo was just getting underway, and he later held ecclesiastical
positions at the Cathedrals of Forlì and Ferrara. All the while, he composed music, of which
sadly only three songs survive in legible form today. When it came to the study
of music, Ugolino advocated for a middle ground, somewhere between matters of
musical practice and more abstract questions about the nature of music and
sound that had been debated since antiquity. Believing that the approaches of
both musical thinking and musical practice go hand-in-hand, Ugolino argued that
“those who desire to be trained a little in the background to such practice require
a measure of speculation.”[3]
Ugolino’s treatise on music, Declaratio musicae disciplinae (ca.
1430), is remarkable as an exhaustive treatment of all musical knowledge (scientia) in one systematic and
encyclopedic text in Latin. Covering topics that include singing, instrumental
performance, composing melodies and rhythms, the sense of hearing, the harmony
of the spheres, mathematical ratios of intervals, and more, the treatise was well-known
for its balanced handling of speculative and practical matters, as well as its
integration of ancient and more recent musical writings. A contemporary scholar
even praised Ugolino’s treatise for its ability to “eclipse the labors of all
who have written before him.”[4]
This landmark tome circulated for decades in handwritten copies among leading music
theorists, including John Hothby (ca. 1430-1487), Franchino Gaffurio (1451-1522),
and Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja (ca. 1440-after 1491), some of whom quoted
passages in later debates concerning musical notation, counterpoint, and tuning
systems.
Image 3: Gaffurio’s ownership mark in his copy of Ugolino’s Declaratio in London, British Library,
Additional MS 33519, f. 110v
In a recent article,[5] I
drew attention to this lasting readership of Ugolino’s Declaratio, and to the occasional confusion that the treatise was
instead authored by the theorist, mathematician, and physician Prosdocimo de’
Beldemandi (d. 1428), the very theorist whose erased name I discovered in the
Vatican Library’s Rossi 455 manuscript this past summer. Based at nearby Padua,
Prosdocimo authored several treatises on music, astronomy, and mathematics. Like
Ugolino, he completed a commentary on the late medieval Libellus cantus mensurabilis as well as a treatise about how to
divide the monochord.[6]
Examples of this
confusion over attributing the Declaratio
include the early sixteenth-century music theorist Giovanni del Lago (ca. 1490
- 1544), who quoted from the Declaratio
frequently in his letters to fellow theorist Giovanni Spataro and others,
although he believed the passages to come from treatises by Prosdocimo. Using textual evidence, Bonnie
Blackburn, Edward Lowinsky, and Clement Miller have claimed that Del Lago was
most likely copying passages of the Declaratio
from the Rossi 455 manuscript, while penning his letters.[7]
In light of Giovanni del Lago’s early sixteenth-century
confusion that Prosdocimo wrote the Declaratio,
what is exciting to me is the possibility that at one point this illuminated
copy of the Declaratio might have been
ascribed to Prosdocimo. With none of the surviving sources of the treatise up
to now offering such an ascription to Prosdocimo, or even hinting at one (nor
to anyone else besides Ugolino), this erasure is an intriguing lead. While the
several topics of musical theory that were treated with great detail by both
Prosdocimo and Ugolino make such a muddling of authorship understandable, I
remain acutely curious to better know the intellectual relationship of the two
theorists. Together with the proposal by Blackburn et al. that I-Rvat Ross. 455 was Del Lago’s source of Ugolino’s theoretical writings, this small discovery contained
on a blank page may now assure us that what might have appeared to be a foolish
error or slapdash guesswork by an early reader of Ugolino’s treatise like Del
Lago was in fact an act of seemingly accurate citation.
Evan
A. MacCarthy is Assistant Professor of Music History at West Virginia
University. He is presently preparing a new critical edition and first-ever
translation of Ugolino’s Declaratio Musicae
Disciplinae for Brepols Press. He is also completing a monograph on the
study of music by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century. His essays have
recently appeared in The Cambridge
History of Fifteenth-Century Music (Cambridge and New York, 2015), Qui musicam in se habet: Studies in Honor of
Alejandro Planchart (Münster, 2015), Renaissance
Then and Now (Pisa, 2014), Beyond 50
Years of Ars Nova Studies at Certaldo, 1959-2009 (Lucca, 2014), the Journal of the Alamire Foundation (2013),
and elsewhere.
[1] Thanks to generous support in the form of a grant
from the West Virginia Humanities Council and a West Virginia University
Faculty Senate Grant for Research and Scholarship.
[2] The erasure can be read
on the verso of the flyleaf, which is ruled but
otherwise blank, below the very last ruled line, near the bottom of the page,
and upside down. The
arrangement of this folio’s ruling also appears to be flipped, when compared
with the ruling on every other folio in the manuscript, suggesting to me that
this folio was removed, then rebound upside down and backwards, perhaps to hide
the erasure of the incorrect ascription. The folio is not numbered among the
other fascicles of the MS, but the quality of the parchment and the ruling
indicate that it must be an original folio to the volume. One possibility is
that it might have been some kind of "top sheet" and the name was
erased and inserted at the time of binding as a flyleaf to protect the
illuminated first folio. While art historians have identified this
manuscript’s illuminators (Giorgio d’Alemagna and Guglielmo Giraldi), I have
elsewhere argued for more specific dates of illumination and binding (October
1453, in Ferrara), using archival payment records from the Este court in
Ferrara (which are now in the Archivio di Stato in Modena), and that one of its
two scribes is the same scribe as that of the important mid-fifteenth-century
polyphonic songbook, Porto, Biblioteca Múnicipal Publica, Ms. 714 (P-Pm 714),
as well as two other theoretical manuscripts. On the identification of the
illuminators, see Giordana Mariani Canova, Guglielmo
Giraldi: miniature estense (Modena, 1995), 51-56; Federica Toniolo, La
miniatura a Ferrara: dal tempo di Cosmè Tura all’eredità di Ercole de’ Roberti
(Modena, 1998), 141-145; Cesarino Ruini,
“Produzione e commitenza dei trattati di teoria musicale nell’Italia del
Quattrocento,” in Quellen und Studien zur
Musiktheorie der Mittelalters III, ed. M. Bernhard (Munich, 2001), 341-357,
at 350-2; Camilla Cavicchi, “Strumenti musicali a Ferrara nel Rinascimento.
Prassi, collezionismo, sperimentazione,” (Tesi di laurea, Alma Mater
Studiorum-Università di Bologna, 2001), 68-73. On my proposed new dating, see Evan A. MacCarthy,
“Music and Learning in Early Renaissance Ferrara, c. 1430-1470,” (Ph.D. diss.,
Harvard University, 2010), 98-126; MacCarthy, “The Sources and Early Readers of
Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio Musice
Discipline,” in Beyond 50 Years of Ars Nova Studies at Certaldo,
1959-2009 (L’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, vol. VIII),
ed. Marco Gozzi, Agostino Ziino, and Francesco Zimei (Lucca: Libreria Musicale
Italiana, 2014), 401-425, at 419-422.
[3] Ugolino, Declaratio
musicae disciplinae, ed. Albert Seay (Rome: American Institute of
Musicology, 1959-62), 2: 60-61.
[4] Biondo Flavio, Italia
Illustrata, IV.34.
[5] MacCarthy, “The Sources and Early
Readers,” 410-411.
[6] For a recent appraisal of Prosdocimo’s theoretical writings, see the
introduction to Jan Herlinger’s edition of Plana musica and Musica speculativa (Urbana, 2008).
[7] Bonnie J. Blackburn, Edward E. Lowinsky, and Clement A. Miller, eds., A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians
(Oxford, 1991), 152-5.