Only thumbnails are available on this page at this time since it is unclear whether permission to publish these plates in my thesis also includes electronic versions.
| Plate 1. I-Pu 1115 (PadB), f. A: | |
JPEG image: 694 x 969 (135 kb) |
The two voices of Se per dureça are found at the top, with the
contratenor of a composition entitled Ay si found below. Notice
that the two initial capital S's and the capital C were never added.
In the margin, a small s (looking like a hook) can be easily seen
before the fourth staff as an indicator to a future scribe. At the
top and bottom of the page Bachinius wrote the call number
YY.2.n.23 AC 3 in the mid-fifteenth century. He also inventoried the
rest of the manuscript and signed his name. Notice the difference
in spacing of the minims ( |
| Plate 2. I-Pu 1115 (PadB), f. AV: | |
JPEG image: 705 x 932 (118 kb) |
The top voice of Aler m'en veus is written here. At the top
of the page, an attribution of "Johans" is found; possibly the
missing folio on the other side has "Ciconia" or some variation on
that name written at the top. The five staves of empty space
at the bottom of the page would have given enough room to write
a second voice had one existed originally. Norms of page layout
in Padua c. 1400 suggest that either the second voice was missing or
that a third voice was originally present. Although the shapes of
the notes are identical to the notes of Se per dureça in f. A, the
two compositions are in different notational systems.
That Aler m'en veus is in French notation can be seen by the
scarcity of dots of division such as are seen throughout Se per dureça.
Notice the large modern-style sharp (#) in the second staff.
Other scribes use a sign which resembles a modern natural sign
( |
| Plate 3. I-Pu 658 (PadC), back cover, (photo reversed): | |
JPEG image: 776 x 1080 (182 kb) |
This plate reproduces the wooden inside cover of MS 658. Originally, f. B of PadC was pasted to the rear cover of the manuscript to protect the main corpus of the manuscript. When f. B was removed, much of the ink remained on the wood. Surprisingly, a nearly legible copy of the composition, Apolinis eclipsatur remained on the parchment as well. When a transparency of the parchment is superimposed upon a mirror image of the cover, such as the one above, an almost total reconstruction of the composition can be created. Because of the possible damage to the cover and to the parchment, many flyleaves remain pasted to their manuscript covers continuing to conceal the contents of their reverse side. Houghton library MS 122 (US-CAh 122) is one such flyleaf, containing unica compositions from northern Italy. Notice that PadC uses six-line staves as opposed to the five-line staves of PadA and PadB. The large spaces between notes is a result of the long text being set syllabically (one note per syllable). |
| Plate 4. I-Pu 1475 (PadA), f. B: | |
Image currently unavailable. |
The polyphonic music fragments in I-Pu 1475 were used to strengthen
the cover of the manuscript. Since they were not to be seen, the
damage they were allowed to suffer was more extensive than that of the
other four fragments studied. Folio B shows a setting of the Sanctus
from the mass for three voices by "Sant Omer". Different sections the
Sanctus have been lost in each voice. For example, the middle voice
has the complete "Pleni sunt celi et terra gloria tua" preserved
(fifth staff), while the top voice is missing the
ending (second staff) and the tenor voice (bottom) is missing the
initial "Pleni" (eighth staff). Two other folios have similar vertical
cuts (ff. D, F). Reconstructing the music of the versos presents
an even greater difficulty, since on those pages the clefs and incipits
are missing. Like many of the sacred pieces in PadA, this Sanctus
uses greater numbers of breves ( |