Squarcialupi Codex (Francesco Landini page)
<p>This page from the Squarcialupi Codex (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Med. Pal. 87) is the opening folio of the section devoted to Francesco Landini, the blind Florentine organist who is the central composer of the Italian ars nova. The miniature shows Landini seated, playing the portative organ that became his iconographic attribute. The page opens his complete surviving songs in two-part and three-part settings: ballate, madrigals, and the new polyphonic forms that Landini and his contemporaries developed in fourteenth-century Florence, Padua, and northern Italian centers.</p><p>The Squarcialupi Codex, compiled in Florence around 1410 to 1415, is the single most important source for trecento Italian secular music: 216 parchment folios preserving 354 compositions by twelve named composers, beautifully illuminated with author portraits and decorative borders. It is named for the organist Antonio Squarcialupi (1416 to 1480), who owned it in the second half of the fifteenth century; how the codex passed into his possession is not known, but its survival in the Medici library after his death ensured its preservation through the centuries.</p><p>Landini (c. 1325 to 1397) lost his sight to smallpox in childhood and became the most celebrated organist of his generation in Italy, crowned with the laurel by Petrarch at Venice in 1364. His 154 surviving compositions, mostly preserved through the Squarcialupi Codex, are the central corpus of fourteenth-century Italian secular polyphony. The codex is held at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the library designed by Michelangelo and built between 1525 and 1571. The Squarcialupi Codex is, with the Roman de Fauvel manuscript and the Old Hall Manuscript, one of the three principal sources of late-medieval European polyphonic music.</p>
