The Atri Fragment
Claudia Colini
In 1973, Agostino Ziino discovered a music piece written on a parchment fragment from a codex dating to the early fifteenth century, afterwards known as the Atri Fragment. It contains a copy of the Gloria Micinella by Antonio Zacara da Teramo on its recto side and the ballata Be’llo sa Dio on its verso. The fragment suffered damage due to its reuse by bookbinders and exposure to water, and the verso side is mostly illegible. The fragment was analyzed using Multispectral Imaging (MSI), using the Eureka Vision System, to recover the lost writing, which is now almost completely legible in the processed images.
Fig. 1: Atri Fragment, verso
Furthermore X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF), with the Elio spectrometer, was used to reconstruct the writing process of the manuscript. In fact, the ballata Be’llo sa Dio differs in visual appearance from the Gloria, suggesting that the former was added to the manuscript at a later time, on a leaf that was left blank.
CSMC
The analysis of the writing materials pointed out the use of two different iron-gall inks, one for the stave lines (Type I) and the other for both musical pieces and for both musical notes and text (Type II) (Fig 2). The fingerprints of the two inks differ in the relative content of iron, suggesting that the same vitriol was employed to prepare two inks with different recipes, characterised by a different ratio between organic and inorganic parts.
We can therefore conclude that the fragment was written in three instances, occurring in a short period of time: first the stave lines were drawn with ink type I, then the Gloria was written with ink type II, and finally the ballata Be’llo sa Dio also with ink type II but with a pen with a smaller nib, possibly to fit it in the blank space. Since the two musical pieces share the same ink (as well as some palaeographical characteristics), we can conclude that they were written by the same scribe.