Dating Italian Music Manuscripts

Within the corpus of Western European manuscripts containing polyphonic music, a specific Italian tradition can be distinguished in the 14th and early 15th centuries. These manuscripts contain a musical repertory that takes its name from its era, the Trecento, and consists of secular song genres in Italian (madrigals, ballatas, and caccias), as well as Latin motets and other compositions for liturgical use.

To answer some previously unresolved questions about the writing processes as well as the shaping and reshaping of these manuscripts, a CSMC research project analysed the production processes and visual organisation in Italian music manuscripts from the first decades of the 15th century. With the help of a multi-analytical, non-destructive approach, members of the Mobile Lab examined the illuminations in two manuscripts copied from the Squarcialupi Codex. They identified modern pigments, which allowed them to place the manuscripts in the context of 19th-century illumination practices. Manuals of that time provide a wealth of information on specific illumination practices and the availability of writing and painting materials, which match with the ones that were used for these artefacts.

The cases studies were carried out in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto (July 2018) and at Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf (November 2018 and October 2019), respectively.