Damiano Moilli and Bernardo Moilli, R2 (M)

An abbreviated gradual was the first known book printed by Damiano Moilli and his brother Bernardo Moilli (de Moylle, di Moli) Dated io April i477 at Parma, this book was the second dated printed music and the first printed gradual in roman plainchant; the earlier Graduale printed about 1473, without printer or place, had used gothic plainchant types Just six months earlier, in Rome, Han had printed the first music in Italy and the first roman plainchant The wording of the colophon of the Parma Graduale shows an awareness of its historical importance: Musica Bernardo Damiano fratribus ars est Sic impressa prius: genuit quos parma moyllos: I477 die x aprilis The art of music is for the first time printed thusly [in the gradual] by the brothers Bernardo and Damiano, whom Parma bore as members of the Moylle family: io April 1477 Fava suggested that by including a "sic " in the colophon, the brothers claimed only to be the first to print the gradual, not the first to print music', but the first gradual was printed on the other side of the Alps.

A gradual is a book of the music rather than the text of the Mass, so nearly every one of the 106 leaves of the Parma Graduale contains music, in contrast to only 16 leaves of music in Han's Missale The abbreviated form of the printed Graduale contrasts with the expanded versions of manuscript graduals written in Damiano's shop in the I48os and i49os for the Benedictine monastery of S Giovanni Evangelista in Parma (for example, the gradual of 212 leaves, Parma, Bib Pal., Corale N 8, 1486) Damiano Moilli was born after 1439 in Parma to Francesco Moilli, an illuminator and ceramicist (boccalaio, terracotta jug maker), and was already a book printer and illuminator in his first appearance in documents in I474.2 Later in the account books of the monastery (1477-1500) he is listed as a cartalaio or paper dealer, an illuminator, and occasionally as a bookseller, ceramicist, and bookbinder Of Bernardo little is known beyond the mention of him in the colophon of this one Graduale Damiano's career is unusual for the fifteenth century in that he left the printing trade to provide the monastery of S Giovanni Evangelista with antiphonals, graduals,

and other liturgical manuscripts out of a shop staffed with scribes, illuminators, and binders Damiano himself provided some of the large pen-drawn initials that finished the manuscript books.3 He published and apparently wrote the only in i Domenico Fava, "II corale a stampa del 1477 e i suoi autori, Chiesa SS Incoronata di Lodi," Archivio Storico per la Citta, i Comuni del Territorio Lodigiano e della Diocesi de Lodi, 58 (1939): 54-56; rewritten as "Le conquiste tecniche di un grande tipografo del Quattrocento," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1940): 147-562 Fava, "Le conquiste," p 149 3 An example of a pen-drawn initial by Damiano Moilli is included in Laudadeo Testi's "I corali miniati della chiesa di S Giovanni Evangelista in Parma," La Bibliofilia 20 (1918): 15·

cunabulum on calligraphy, an Alfabeto of roman capital letters which followed the gradual by a year or two.4 Two other books, without music, were published in the next decade by Damiano Moilli in conjunction with another Parma paper dealer and bookseller, Giovanni Antonio Montalli, but these were commercial products for the local trade rather than ambitious milestones in printing like the two first elegant editions, both original in content and technique Because of Damiano Moilli's limited involvement in printing and his return to the manuscript trade, Fava suspected that Moilli was never a printer but, rather, a publisher who provided capital to printers Early in this century, Reichling (R 1176) described the only known copy of the Parma Graduale (Figs 34-35) as having been printed from two sizes of gothic metal text type, a description that completely ignored the music type.6 In his discussion of the Moillis and their Graduale, Fava proposed a technique of printing the book that consigned the music (red) and staves (black) to a woodcut technique.7 My examination of the Graduale convinced me that the plainchant was printed from metal type just as was the text, in a font of roman plainchant (R2) via the double-impression process normally used for music incunabula, one form of type for red ink and another for black.8 Several features are unusual, however.

The most striking feature is its large size A page of the Graduale is very large (480 X 360 mm in the Lodi copy, which is heavily trimmed) Each of the four staves with its line of text measures I Io mm The x-height of the text type is 20 mm The staff is 55 mm high and each of its three spaces is i8 mm, nearly double that of the next largest staff printed in Italy in the fifteenth century, the I499 Graduale printed by Emerich (x-height 13 mm, staff 32 mm, space I I mm) The normal virga is about 20 mm or 13/16ths of an inch high Even in contemporary manuscript graduals the luxury of such spacious layout was unusual Certainly no other Italian printed music in a folio format had fewer than seven staves per page The Moilli brothers went to great lengths to provide a book that would exactly imitate the manuscript product of their Parma shop in both size and style of its alphabetic and music type, in its layout even to the red-ruled margins at the sides, and in its large gothic initials with the curls and cutouts of the manuscript versions The only previous font of roman plainchant type had consisted of only twelve designs (Han's R I of 1476); the Parma Graduale used thirty-three designs One reason the Parma font used more than twice as many characters as Han's is that Han's font had been created to print a missal, which includes only a few leaves of the fairly simple syllabic chant sung by the priest, whereas the Parma font

was intended for a gradual, a complete book of the much more complex neumes of melismatic plainchant sung by the choir A more important reason seems to be the attempt of the Moilli brothers to create a type that would more closely resemble traditional notation, by using several sizes of stems for the virga and direct Han had been content with one virga in his plainchant font, but the Moilli brothers used two virga designs, one with the stem on the right, the other with the stem on the left, and each of these had four different stem lengths, for a total of eight virga characters The direct of the Parma Graduale has an impressive flourish above and below the note indicated, a basic design that required variants for use at the top and the bottom of the staff, while Han had been content with a tiny basic design that could be used on any line or space of the staff The wish to make music printed with metal type resemble manuscript notation was also responsible for the high number of abutting and kerned types that could be joined together to create complex neumes If many music notes were necessary to represent the music for one syllable of the text, those notes could be connected on the Moilli 4 A facsimile edition was printed in 1927 after the discovery of a copy of the Alfabeto in the previous year: A Newly Discovered Treatise on Classic Letter Design, ed Stanley Morison (Paris: Pegasus, 1927).

5 "II corale," p 60 6 I owe thanks to Luigi Samarati, Director of the Biblioteca Comunale, for permitting me to examine at his library the Graduale, part of an impressive collection of manuscript graduals and antiphonals at the Chiesa dell'Incoronata in Lodi Since my visit a second copy of the Graduale has been discovered at a Benedictine monastery in Genoa 7 Fava, "II corale a stampa," pp 54-61 Descriptions based on his notes were included in Haebler 2: 72 and BMC VII:xlviii 8 For an explanation of the printing process with metal type see my "The Music Type of the Second Dated Printed Music Book, the 1477 Graduale Romanum," La Bibliofilia 89 (1987): 285-307.

FIG 34 Graduale Parma: Damiano Moilli and Bernardo Moilli, io IV 1477, f xiiii (Chiesa SS Incoronata, Lodi.) printed pages as they would have been on the manuscript pages In Han's type, notes and neumes had been cast as complete characters, and separate types were not made to be joined to create more complex neumes As a result, chant printed with RI often could not fulfill the original purpose of plainchant: marking syllables by means of neumes Han sometimes was forced to break up the neume over one syllable and print it with the type designs available to him as if it consisted of separate parts In contrast, the neumatic character and spacing of the chant are carefully retained in the Parma Graduale by tightly joining characters to keep together all notes to be sung on one syllable An ample number of designs were cast in metal to create the complex neumes of the original chant notation, and the abutting typefaces were cast on bodies that allowed the printed images to be joined tightly together.

FIG 35 Graduale Parma: Damiano Moilli and Bernardo Moilli, io IV I477 Mensural Credo (Chiesa SS Incoronata, Lodi.) Greatly reduced in size Notes or neumes printed above or below the staff were cast as kerned designs extending beyond the type body in order to be set next to the standard body of the alphabetic type (see R2 type specimen: virga A5, punctum 1a and 1b, podatus ia) The lozenge has a kerned variant that allowed the notes of the climacus to be set tightly together The Parma type might have included even more characters if the printers had tried to use the mensural notation that was standard for the Credo in the gradual of the late fifteenth century Despite

the fact that its notation required characters that had not appeared in the plainchant, no extra type was cast for it by the Moilli brothers Instead they used the plainchant virga for the semibreve and the lozenge for the minim, and they reversed a short-stemmed virga and joined it to a punctum to form a ligature of semibreves A comparison of the mensural Credo in the 1477 Graduale (Fig 35) to that in the Venetian I499/500o Graduale (see type specimen R21 ) shows the paucity of mensural characters in the earlier edition In the 1477 Credo there are

no semiminims or diagonal ligatures such as are found in Emerich's more elaborate designs for mensural chant In contrast to the frequent liquescence of the I499 Graduale printed by Emerich from a carefully prepared copytext edited by an international committee, the only suggestion of liquescence in the Parma Graduale comes in the virga cum orisco and in the few instances of neumes printed with the singular character which suggests both the upper and the lower ornamentation of the cephalicus and epiphonus The design for the virga cum orisco could be printed upside down so that the ornament to be added could be either an upper or a lower neighbor All other Italian fifteenth-century printed plainchant provided only the design with an upper neighbor Only one other printer used such a liquescence design in Italy in the fifteenth century, Bonini in R3 i Since the Parma Graduale seems to imitate closely the manuscript chant books of that city, perhaps such common designs of mensural notation as key signatures, diagonals, and semiminims did not appear in the manuscript copytext for the Graduale and therefore were not considered necessary for the printed version.

R2 (M), Roman Very Large Antiphonal, 55:9[sup(2)] x 21–22

55:9; X 21-22 Photographs: Graduale Romanum, Parma, Damiano and Bernardo Moilli, io IV i477; Lodi, Biblioteca Comunale Laudense; the author's photographs taken with a hand-held camera (scale may be slightly off from top to bottom of a photo) Editions: Damiano and Bernardo Moilli I io IV 1477, Graduale Romanum, 2° Staff: 55 Space: i8 x-height: 20 Music form: 379 X 30o9-5 Music pages: 212 Staves: rules (cast metal?) No per page: 4 Virga A 92 X 21-22 22 X 17-19 3 92 X 26 48 X 9 36 5 Kerned at top, 92 X 23

Virga B, stem on left (used only in combination with other types to form neumes) I (in clivis)92 x 23-24 4 a kern removed? 2 (in clivis) 92 X 39 3 (in climacus) 92 47 Punctum 92 (a) kerned at bottom Lozenge (used as single neume in climacus or as semibreve) in mensural notation) 27 9 for bottom of staff (b) kerned at top io-ii X 16-20 (a) kerned (in climacus)

Torculus i center note only, apparently with stems at right and left Torculus 2 center note 6.5 X 9 X 8 1a 1b A similar character used alone for liquescence, or with virga A2 for a clivis (see below) 27 x 9 x 27 (with virga A2)

Podatus (note that top note is the narrower) I8 X 9 (a) kerned at top 29 X 27 39 X 48 Diagonal I 19 X 25 2 26 X 28 I ia 2 3 I 2 Porrectus I 24 X 26 2 23 X 28 3 29-31 X 33

Virga cum orisco I 21-22 27 2 20-21 X 23-24 320-21 X 16-17 420-21 C clef 14 X 22 2 kerned at top F clef 3 X io plus C clef Accidental, B flat

Direct (kerned at top and bottom?) I 8-9 X 26 a broken at top b broken at bottom c broken 2 small, for interior placement Semibreve for mensural notation (combination of virga A2 [inverted] and punctum i) Bar lines (rules), about 55 mm