The End of the Ars Nova in Italy: The San Lorenze Palimpsest and Related Repertories

With the term “the end of the Ars Nova” the book evokes a discontinuity in the manuscript tradition that coincides with the years of the resolution of the Schism. After that time, the Italian composers who constitute the bulk of the “canon” of fourteenth-century music preserved in the most studied anthological collections (in addition to SL these are Fp, Pit, Sq, R) suddenly largely disappear from the cultural horizon represented in the known collections copied only a few decades later, such as Q15 and Ox213. For example, although the beginning of Q15’s compilation was not much later than that of SL, the collections have in common only two composers (Hubertus de Salinis and Antonio Zacara da Teramo) and three compositions (three motets by Hubertus). The focus on the end of the Ars Nova, then, does not follow a particular narrative but looks at a time of great movement on the part of musicians and their repertories throughout the continent; both in the context of shared musical stylistic transitions and marked by important events, the most significant of which are without a doubt the Councils of Pisa and Constance. Underscored in Italy, especially the Veneto, Rome, and Florence, is the powerful co-existence of a preservation of traditional and innovative repertories. We have here aimed not at an individual examination of SL, but rather at placing its contents in the larger Ars Nova context. This also means that the focus of this publication is not limited to the city of Florence, but includes other culturally prominent areas of Italy such as Lombardy and Naples.