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Karen Desmond, Florentius on music, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 687–688, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas103
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Extract
This elegant volume—issued as part of the I Tatti Renaissance Library series—offers the Latin text and an English translation of a 15th-century treatise on music written by the musician and priest Florentius de Faxolis (1461–96). The editors, Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, also provide detailed notes to both the text and translation, an opening chapter that serves to introduce Florentius the man and his cultural context, a chapter on Florentius’s Latin, and a textual commentary that elaborates on some of the more significant or interesting points of theory contained in his Liber musices.
Florentius, in all likelihood a Lombard, acquired benefices from a number of institutions that were under Milanese rule (San Fiorenzo at Fiorenzuola d’Arda, Santa Maria della Stella outside the Porta Tosa and San Vittore in Porlezza). The editors support this traditional biography of Florentius, refuting with convincing argument Francesco Rocco Rossi’s recent claim that Florentius was an unknown Spaniard whom Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza (the dedicatee of Liber musices) met while he was resident in Naples (see F. R. Rossi, ‘Auctores in opusculo introducti: L’enigmatico Florentius musicus e gli sconosciuti referenti teorici del Liber musices [I-Mt 2146]’, Acta musicologica, lxxx (2008), pp.165–77). Ascanio was sent into exile for a time by his brother Ludovico il Moro, and lived in Pavia, Ferrara and Naples, before being allowed to return to Milan in 1482. The editors of the current edition hypothesize that Florentius was a chaplain in Ascanio’s entourage for part of his exile (p.x). Ascanio was an amateur musician, having been taught to read music by Ercole d’Este in Ferrara, and he probably commissioned Florentius to write this treatise to round out his own musical education (p.xi). In the preface, Florentius apologizes for how long it took him to write his book (the treatise is dated to between 1485 and 1492) and justifies the book’s necessity with the claim that ‘both the scarcity of books and their obscurity compelled me to write a new work’ (i.1.31, p.31). The value of the treatise is attested to by the high-quality illuminations of Attavante degli Attavanti in its only manuscript source, Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, Ms.2146 (copied c.1495–6; colour plates of the title and dedication pages serve as the frontispiece to this edition). The editors follow Alibinia de la Mare’s attribution of the illuminations directly to Attavante himself rather than merely to his workshop. The text scribe is identified ‘as one of the most famous calligraphers of the end of the Quattrocento: Alessandro da Verrazzano’ (p.240).
