III—
Early Music Type and Typefounders
Music Type
Apart from the books themselves, physical evidence concerning printing and type of the fifteenth century is almost nonexistent The first crude printed picture of a printing press does not appear until about 1499 (Danse macabre [Lyons: Matthew Husz]), and the first representation of a typefounder was not printed until 1568 (a woodcut by Jost Amman in Hans Sachs's Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stande [Frankfurt: Feyerabend]) The unlikely recovery of about two hundred and fifty pieces of early type from the Saone River at Lyons has inspired many times that number of words about their manufacture Some copper punches and lead matrices survive from a Dutch foundry of about I5oo.1 Finally, over the years, two to three dozen examples have been discovered in incunabula of accidental impressions made by displaced types that had fallen onto the locked-up form during the inking process.2 So far as I know, the only piece of physical evidence concerning incunabula music printing is the impression of a displaced type (probably a piece of spacing material) in the copy of the I499/I500 Graduale Romanum (Venice: Emerich for Giunta) in the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley This happenstance provides important evidence to support a new hypothesis concerning the body sizes of early music type and how it was set in forms.
Printing type has its own descriptive terminology and standard size referents (the arrows in Fig 4 point to measurements of height to paper, x-height, and body size) Kerned and abutting faces, two variants of the standard face on a piece of type, are important for early music types A kerned type is one whose face is wider than its body, so that it overlaps the shoulder of the adjacent type (Fig 5) The letter f is one of the few kerned types still commonly in use, but in the i49os in Venice fonts of cursive Greek and Latin type were being cut that relied heavily on kerned sorts whose faces could be more than twice as wide as their bodies.3 Abutting types are those that have been cast or altered by filing in such a way as to have closely adjoining typefaces on bodies without shoulders Staff segments are examples of music types cast to abut each other.4 Type is the product of a process that begins with the cutting of a punch, involves the striking of i Michael Clapham, "Printing," in A History of Technology, 8 vols., ed Charles Singer, E J Holmyard, A R Hall, and Trevor I Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I954-I984), 3:392.
2 For a review of the literature on displaced type, see Michael Pollak, "Incunable Printing with the Form Inverted: An Untenable Theory," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1973): 168-84; Victor Scholderer, "The Shape of Early Type," in his Fifty Essays in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Bibliography, ed Dennis E Rhodes (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1966), p 107 3 For a photograph of a kerned type that overlaps an adjacent type, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p 32, fig i8 4 For an illustration of one of the staff segments of van den Keere's "Grande Musicque" (punch, matrix, and type cast from the matrix), see illus 3a, b, c of H Edmund Poole's "Printing" in The New Grove Dictonary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 15: 237.
FIG 4 The terminology of a piece of modern type and its printed image (Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography [New York: Oxford University Press, 1972], p 9.) the punch into a matrix, and ends with the casting of an individual piece of type by pouring hot metal into a mold to which the matrix is affixed The process was first described in a technical manual by Vanuccio Biringucci, an Italian metallurgist of the early sixteenth century: The letters for printing books are made of a composition of three parts of fine tin [stagno fino], an eighth part of black lead [piombo negro], and another eighth part of fused marcasite of antimony The desired quantities of these metals are melted and cast into bars so arranged that they can easily be cut Then a mold [formal is made of brass [ottone] or bronze [bronzo], as true as possible and flat so that ii: may fit into its companion The parts of this mold are adjusted to make the thickness and length of the stems of the letters, and likewise are adapted underneath so that the matrix [madre] can be put in exactly The matrix is the impression of the letter that you wish to make, or rather to cast, made by the steel punch [polzone de l'acciaro]
on a little piece of copper When the matrix has been put in its place and the thicknesses likewise fixed by means of certain little screws which secure and close all the pieces of the mold in their places, some of that composition is melted in an iron pot and the letters cast one at a time with a ladle When they have the desired quantity of one kind of letter, they take out the matrix and insert another, continuing in this way until they have as many as they wish of all kinds Then they cut off FIG 5 a A sixteenth-century font of music type with many kerned sorts, composed for printing a specimen b A kerned virga with a bent stem (Copyright Plantin-Moretus Museum)
the gates [gitti] and adjust them all to the same size with a mold as a little gauge.* With these letters, one by one, the compositors set the press forms for the books in a frame [telaro] made of iron, bronze, or wood, and compress and lock them in with screws in the outer edges * In the second edition of 1550 the sentence is altered to read: "Then they remove the said letters and cut off the foot, that is, the part that is to lie on the bed where the composition is placed for printing when the work is being carried out; first, however, those fins that remain attached to the letters in casting are removed one by one with a knife so that they may remain wholly clean and without any unevenness." The antimony present in Biringucci's type would have increased its hardness considerably Antimony was apparently not added to type metal until the end of the incunabula period, when it theoretically had the effect of allowing finer detail in the design of type.6 Early fonts of softer metal had short lives; many fifteenth-century music fonts appear to have been used only once.
Fragmentary evidence about fifteenth-century music printing and typefounding exists in such documents as contracts (see the discussion in Chapter VIII of Antonio Zarotto), testaments (see the discussion in Chapter IX of Francesco Girardengo and his partner Giovanni Beretta), privileges, colophons, and lawsuits involving those in the book trade Sixteenth-century physical and documentary evidence is more accessible, including the major resources of the collection of type and business records of Christopher Plantin at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp Types, type specimens, and inventories of Christopher Plantin ( 520-I 589)gives us the names and sizes of sixteen sets of music punches, twelve sets of matrices, and one music mold.7 Those identified as the products of particular type designers are listed in Table 9 The inventory of Guillaume Le Be's sixteenth-century typefoundry listed matrices and punches for twenty-three music types, six of them plainchant (see Table io).8 ST68 is identified as "Grande Musicque" in the Appendix of Parker et al., "Typographica Plantiniana II," but on p 74 in the I58I inventory as "Grosses Notes de Musicque plain Chant de la taille de Henry du Tour." It is clearly not a plainchant type and was used first in 1578 for the polyphonic masses of
Georges de la Hele The 1581 inventory specifies thirty-nine punches, but the illustration of the extant punches uses only thirty-eight The matrices for ST68, MA9ia, have the same problem with name in the 1581 inventory The answer may lie in 5 Biringucci, Pirotechnia, trans Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1942), pp 374-76 The Italian words have been added from the original edition printed by Venturino Roffinello in Venice in 1540. 6 Michael Pollak, "The Durability of Fifteenth-Century Type," Visible Language 5 (197 ): 160-6 In his dissertation on Petrucci's printing ("Petrucci at Fossombrone: A Study of Early Music Printing, with Special Reference to the Motetti de la Corona [I514-1519]," University of London, 1976, p 29), Stanley Boorman proposed that Petrucci's strongest claim for innovation in printing history might lie in the addition of antimony to his type metal He cited as major differences between incunabula music type and that of Petrucci the latter's small size, lighter design, and consistent use of hollow diamond-headed notes, but those characteristics can already be seen in the first mensural type of 1480 7 The type specimens of 1567 and ca 1585 are reproduced in Type Specimen Facsimiles II: Reproductions of Christopher Plantin's Index sive Specimen Characterum I567 & Folio Specimen of c 585 Together with the Le Be-Moretus Specimen c.I599, with annotations by Hendrik D L Vervliet and Harry Carter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) Only three types appear in Plantin's specimens and they are
all mensural types, apparently single-impression (ca 1585 specimen, nos 80-82) Several early inventories are presented in Mike Parker, K Melis, and H D L Vervliet, "Typographica Plantiniana II: Early Inventories of Punches, Matrices, and Molds in the Plantin-Moretus Archives," De Gulden Passer 38 (1960):-I139 The mold is described in Mike Parker, "Early Typefounders' Moulds at the Plantin-Moretus Museum," The Library, ser 5, 29 (1974): 98-99 8 The inventory of Guillaume Le Be's sixteenth-century typefoundry was made sometime after I617 by Le Be's son and is known today through a copy made by Jean-Pierre Fournier in 1730 when he purchased the typefoundry The inventory was published by Stanley Morison, L'Inventaire de la Fonderie Le Be (Paris: Andre Jammes, 1957), pp 22-26 See Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), plates 6-7, for photographs of the sections referring to music type A specimen apparently prepared by the typecutter himself with manuscript annotations includes three of the music fonts made in the I55os for Le Roy and Ballard in Paris: a mensural "Musique grosse" (i554-i555), a double-impression "Grosse tablature d'epinette," and a single-impression "Petite tablature d'epinette," in H Omont, "Specimens de caracteres hebreux, grecs, latins et de musique graves a Venise et a Paris par Guillaume Le Be (1545-1592)," Memoires de la Societe de l'Histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France 15 (1888): plate 3.
Table 9 Music types of Christopher Plantin's shop Extant material at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp: ST = punches; MA = matrices; LMA = lost matrices; PM = type; GI = molds Type Designer Type Name Punches Matrices Type Mold Robert Granjon Petit Musique sur le Gros Texte, 22, ST75 25, MAioic (I5I3-ca 1589) 1566 Musique sur 2 R Augustine, 73,ST7xa" LMA36 (single impression) Premieres Notes (double i6, ST64 MA86 impression plainchant) Hendrik van den Keere Grosses Notes d'Espaigne, I574 i6, ST6i 20, MA93 PM222 GI55 (active 1540-1580) Moyennes Notes d'Espaigne, 20, ST62 49, MA8ga PM223 GI55 1573 Grosses Notes de l'Antiphonaire, 30, ST63 MA9o '57' Moyennes Notes du Missel, 1572 35, ST65 41, MA87 Petites Notes pour les ST66 39, MA88 Processionels Petites Notes du Missel, i571 32, ST67 38, MA85 Grande Musicque, 1577 38 [39], 63, MA9Ia PM234 GI55 (single impression) ST68 Grosses Notes ST69 MA9Ib Moyenne Musique, Notes in 4° ST7o 67, MAioo MAio2 Petite Musique sur la ST73 LMAIg Parangonne 2 sets for chant in small missals, 4, MA92d 1571 4, MA92e Daniel Heartz, Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969), p 47 The top two lines of the illustration are impressions struck from the punches, ST7 ia The caption declares the illustration to be "Specimens of
music type made from Granjon's matrices," but the text identifies it as struck off punches; the matrices (LMA36) are lost MA9 I b, eleven matrices of plainchant described by Parker et al (pp 74-75) as an "incomplete set." Would it be complete if it used the designs of MAgia? The incunabula type of Emerich, R2I, is an example of a combined plainchant and mensural font produced to handle the mensural Credo popular at the time., and ST68 may be a similar combination of mensural and plainchant type In addition, Parker et al discredit the large number of matrices by suggesting that they were mixed with the "Grosses Notes d'Espagne" (p 78), but with the manipulation of the punches necessary for staff segments needed as spacing material between, above, and below types, it is quite possible that a large number of matrices was necessary An adjustable mold can do only so much; the contract for this type specified at least three molds, one for staves (for the text of the contract, see p 26) Another inventory made in 1595 of type at the Tipografia Vaticana listed one plainchant type of thirty-two punches and thirty-nine matrices commissioned of Robert Granjon for printing the revi-
Table io Music types of the Le Be typefoundry (ca 1620 inventory) Type Designer Type Name Format Punches Matrices Pierre Attaingnant Notte de gros Plainchant portant ses 2 40 34 (ca I494 550) reglets Philippe Danfrie (ca 1504-I606) Musique des airs 16° 47 Nicolas du Chemin Musique p Messe 2 29 92 (active 154I-1576) Pierre Haultin (active I523-1580) Musique moienne, maigre, vielle 86 Nicolas de Villiers Musique des Nottes de Colin 51 67 Guillaume Le Be Notte de Plainchant Corniches 4° 5 15 (active 1545-I592) Antiph mon pere Robert Granjon (I513-ca 1589) Tablature de lut et Guitarres 85 Musique 4 50 Musique 4° 64 Types from Lyons Musique des airs plaine I6° 55 Musique petite pour airs 70 Musique de Coppie moyenne 34 Musique petite pour psaume 23 Anonymous Musique en blanc de Cicero psaumes 2 18 18 Notte de Plainchant, Grad et Antiph 2 30 27 Notte de Plainchant Process 8° 73 Notte de Plainchant heure notte I6° 62 Notte de Plainchant Missel 8° 60 Notte de gros Plainchant, neant [2°] 39 Notte de gros Plainchant courbez [2°] 30 sion of the gradual undertaken by Palestrina for Gregory XIII.9
Such evidence tells us that sixteenth-century double-impression plainchant fonts varied enormously in size, from the small sets such as Le Be's quarto antiphonal, which required fifteen punches and matrices, and van den Keere's tiny sets of four punches and matrices to quite large sets of seventy-three punches and matrices An average early plainchant type might require from thirty to forty punches and matrices The type specimens of Italian music incunabula suggest that most would require only about fifteen punches and matrices, although some were more elaborate and some were as small as van den Keere's sets Insight into the process of making early music type comes from a contract between the typecutter van den Keere and the printer Christopher Plantin The contract concerns the mensural "Grande Musicque" commissioned by Plantin in 1576 and first used in I578 In a letter of i6 January 1576, after looking over the manuscript leaf sent him by Plantin, van den Keere set his terms for accepting the contract He estimated he would need fifty punches, but thirty-nine proved sufficient and were used to produce sixty-three matrices There would
be "expense beyond the usual, because I shall have to use at least three molds But I hope I could help myself out with your molds by packing [the bodies and jets] as needs be The five staff lines answer exactly to 5 lines of the small, or new, Great Primer, by Garamont, so that its mold will be a useful 9 Alberto Tinto, "Di un inventario della Tipografia Vaticana (I595)," Studi di biblioteconomia e storia del libro in onore di Francesco Barberi, ed Giorgio De Gregorio and Maria Valenti (Rome: Associazione Italiana Biblioteche, 1976), pp 547-49; H D L Vervliet, Robert Granjon a Rome 1578-1589 (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1967), p 33-
one."'° Measurements made of the type in a printed sample indicate that the staff for which Garamond's Great Primer mold could be used was 22.5 mm high; segments were cast in widths ranging from 2 to 25 mm." The largest of the three molds survives today at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. It was made in 573 for the "Grande Musicque" chant type cast for a projected Spanish antiphonal. The extant mold has register setting and nick that exactly fit the museum's cast "Grande Musicque" type, although the interchangeable stools are missing that would have been necessary for casting from one matrix design the sorts of type with the distinctive faces needed to print characters on lines and spaces."2 A punch would take a fine craftsman like van den Keere more than a day; even with extra hired help, only five or six matrices could be justified per day. "The punchcutting will take three months, the justification a fortnight, the molds and other preparatory work on the steel and copper a fortnight, making four months. However, with other work which may intervene, you cannot reckon on less than half a year. And it will cost quite I50 florins before you can think of casting a font, or thereabouts."" Ten months later van den Keere's bill of I I November I577 for the completed punches at 4 florins each was 152 florins, even before striking and justifying the matrices and casting the type. For a book like the 1499/1500 Graduale of Emerich, the publisher Giunta would have had to subsidize text and music types to print the manuscript copytext, which had been especially prepared
in roman plainchant notation for this first edition of the complete Graduale Romanum. Additional commissions would have been necessary for the woodcuts, initials, and unusually large paper. If a punch took more than a day and a sufficient number of men were on hand to justify five to six matrices a day, it would take about a year per font to complete punches and matrices for the two text fonts and a plainchant font designed and cut for the Graduale. The Graduale's plainchant font was larger in size and complexity than van der Keere's and was probably produced by a smaller establishment, so it would have taken longer. Michael Clapham estimated that a text font of about one hundred and fifty punches would have taken two years to produce in the early years of printing.4 It is no wonder that three years intervened between the granting of Petrucci's privilege for mensural type and the first appearance of it in print. A different kind of evidence comes from the modern impression of van den Keere's single-impression "Grande Musique" made from the type cast from thirty-eight punches extant at the Plantin-Moretus Museum.' The large type (printed on a staff of 22.5 mm) illustrates clearly the problems facing punchcutters of music type. The music signs range in size from large clefs and time signatures to small accidentals and rests. Signs that extended into the area of text type above or below the staff would also need a kerned version (see the flagged and unflagged lozenges). Signs such as
accidentals that might occur above or below another printed design or spacing material had to be cast on a small body that occupied the space between two staff lines. The direct (Latin, custos) is the symbol placed at the end of a staff to indicate the first note of the next staff. Fifteenth-century type often included an alternate narrow version for use within a line as well as the normal wide version, generally kerned, that would be set in the margin beyond the end of the staff in a double-impression type. Van den Keere avoided the kerned direct by curling back the angular line on top of the sign after the point of definition of pitch. (c The necessity for multiple punches for minims with shortened stems such as that used in Emerich's R2 is avoided by inverting the minim. io. H. D. L. Vervliet, Sixteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries, foreword by Harry Carter (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1968), p. 334. i. The measurements of the segments are mine, made from the illustrations in Vervliet, Sixteenth-Century Types, P- 33512. Parker, "Early Typefounders' Moulds," pp. 94-95, plate i6A.
13. Vervliet, Sixteenth-Century Types, p. 337. 14. Clapham, "Printing," p. 385. i5. Vervliet, Sixteenth-Century Types, M8, fig. 257, p. 336. For an example of music set with the types, see Plantin's folio specimen ca. 1585, Type Specimen Facsimiles II, and Vervliet, Sixteenth-Century Types, p. 335.
One problem of single-impression music type apparent in music printed with the "Grande Musicque" type is the need for staff segments of varying widths to be used as spacing material between notes; small segments of 2 and 3-25 mm are frequently inserted between printed notes The fifteenth-century printer who cast staff segments for double-impression type could plan their size(s) so that an easy multiple would fit the column width, without taking into consideration the sizes of the notes, which were printed separately in a second impression Spacing material between notes was necessary in the second impression It would not have been type high-that is, as high as the type cast with a face that was intended to make an impression on the printed page-and in the fifteenth century it may have been made of wood In the same way, the type-caster of a double-impression type had to prepare blank spacing material to insert above and below almost every piece of music type There is every indication that such a process was in use for early printed examples of large type such as the complex R2 used in Emerich's Graduale and Antiphonarium A final point of reference for the understanding of punches and matrices of old music type is the physical appearance of their modern counterparts A typical plainchant type in lower and upper cases in the nineteenth century included 128 sorts.l6 As the polyphonic and harmonic complexities of music increased and the details of performance practice
became specific, the size of the music type font grew to nearly 500 sorts Nineteenth-century music fonts were named by their style (chant, music) in "sizes" (Ruby, Diamond, Semi-Nonpareil), but the types were not cast on the point system In his book on music printing, William Gamble wrote that "music type has a 'point' system of its own, otherwise it would be impossible to get the various pieces of type to line up."'7 Since music types are not set on the same line as text type, their body size need not correspond exactly to the size of the text type Still present in modern fonts are the alternate kerned sorts-clefs, noteheads, flagged stems, diagonals (now used to connect groups of eighth notes but identical in design and compositorial problems to the ligature connection of early plainchant diagonals)-that are necessary for printing above or below the staff and thus intruding upon the text type Illustrations of cases of type and specimen sheets carefully note the presence of kerned sorts (unflagged stems no longer need be kerned, because they are built up from small pieces of type that allow variation in length).18
Useful for understanding music types are the variety and number of spacing material sorts for use above, below, and between type with cast typefaces One nineteenth-century music type required eleven different sizes of quads and seven sizes of spaces to set the type in forms.9 Such physical evidence of the technical difficulties in setting music type may help explain why music in print lagged twenty years behind the appearance of printed letters There was little difficulty in casting the musical signs of plainchant in type metal; the difficulty lay in casting them on bodies that would allow the signs to be printed at the proper place on the music staff According to the first detailed description of music typefounding, published in the eighteenth century by Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune,20 double-impression plainchant type may consist of whole notes, which have a body size equal to the body of the staff and for which a single mold is sufficient, or piece notes, which require four molds for four body sizes The latter method probably more closely resembles that used for casting Venetian incunabula music type Of the fifteen punches that Fournier states were needed for either method, one, the dot for added value, would not have been used in the fifteenth century; but many more would have been necessary then, such as ligatures of various shapes and intervals Of Fournier's remaining fourteen music sorts, six are cast in the smallest mold
(the smallest body size: * * ) and five in the next size( r ).Only spacing material was cast in the third size, and the fourth and largest size was used for staves and full and par I6 Theotiste Lefevre, Guide pratique du compositeur d'imprimerie (i880; reprint Westmead, Farnborough: Gregg, 1972), p i68 17 Music Engraving and Printing (1923; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), chap i5, "Typographically Printed Music," pp i68-82; includes several type specimens and a variety of solutions to housing large fonts in typecases I8 Ibid., figs 92-93, pp 179, i8i 19 Ibid., p 179 20 Fournier on Typefounding: The Text of the Manuel Typographique 1764-1766, trans and ed with notes by Harry Carter (London: Fleuron 1930), p 58.
tial barlines Because of the short stems of many of the notes in Venetian incunabula music type, the designs of the first two sizes could have been combined, but a second group of ligatures would have needed a double-size body Staves were cast as abutting four-line segments of standard width, multiples of which would make up a column Fournier advises dispensing with special punches for partial staves, "because shorter sections of the staff are so rarely called for," but that advice was not always appropriate for a fifteenth-century music printer like Emerich, who frequently inserted rubrics of varying length in the staff area, creating irregular blank spaces in the staves Abutting types in Emerich R2 I (for the specimens see Chapter VII) include, in addition to staves, several neumes the typefaces of which may have been altered to abut adjacent text types above or below the line Such abutting variant types had been used by compositors to solve particular problems ever since Gutenberg's first book.21 The first type designers to complete the transformation of complex scripts into type used complex kerned and abutting forms that create compositorial problems (gothic text, Gutenberg; cursive Greek and Latin, Francesco Griffo da Bologna) It is only natural that many instances of variant sorts and altered type are visible in Emerich's roman plainchant font, a font that was only the second attempt to cope with the melismatic music of the gradual in roman plainchant.
Harry Carter attributed the development of music type in such a system of "building up the staff from types of various bodies" to the mid-sixteenth-century typecutters Le Be, Granjon, Nicholas Duchemin, and the two de Sanlecques; they supposedly increased the number of kerns and "arranged the joins after the manner of bricklaying."22 The existing punches and matrices at the Plantin-Moretus Museum show that such a system was functioning in the sixteenth century With the evidence of body size provided by the displaced type accidentally impressed on one leaf of Emerich's Graduale (Fig 6), a system of several sizes of types "joined like brickwork" becomes plausible also as an explanation of the complex plainchant type of the incunabula period Examination of that leaf has allowed me to develop a hypothesis of a system of body sizes for Emerich's R2 I In the copy of the Graduale at the Music Library of the University of California, Berkeley, a piece of type that had evidently been pulled out of the form by the ink balls and had fallen back on the form set with type for the music notes (the staves had already been printed in red) was printed on its side Measurement of the size of the indentation in the paper caused by the type when the sheet was printed indicates that the piece of type protruded a millimeter or two above the faces of the other types The type faces of four pieces-the
preceding clivis and barline and the following virga and cephalicus-were broken by the pressure of the displaced type on the form at the time of impression; the displaced type was apparently resting on or near the shoulders of the broken types at the time of impression A later user has added in ink the first note of the clivis and the missing virga without a stem; still missing are the second note of the clivis, the barline, and the ornamental cephalicus The same leaf without the displaced type appears in the Library of Congress copy (Fig 7; staff 2, with the unbroken clivis, barline, virga, and cephalicus) Since we do not know how deeply the type was broken by the piece of displaced type, the set width of the latter cannot be specified with any certainty However, it is possible to make a fairly accurate estimate with the help of the sixteenth-century artifacts at the Plantin-Moretus Museum Measuring a piece of type (body size of 2 mm) recently cast in a sixteenth-century matrix at the museum gives a distance of 2 mm from typeface to shoulder If this distance is considered approximately normal for the time and is added to the depth of the protrusion into the paper made by the displaced piece of type (roughly I mm), the resulting set width of the displaced type would be no more than 3 mm Since the set width of a virga in Emerich's font must be at least 6 mm, the width of the printed virga face, the displaced piece of type would not be wide enough to be a virga or a cephalicus, the characters that are missing from the impression It must therefore be spacing material The body size of the type is approximately II.5 mm and the height 33 mm (see
Fig 8) I conclude that the body size of the common note of R2 I, the virga with short stem, is I 1.5 mm and that the font would include larger body sizes for 2 I Masson, The Mainz Psalters, pp 42-43 22 The process is described by Harry Carter in "Fell Music Type," Penrose Annual 50 (1956): 73-74.
FIG 6 Graduale Romanum Venice: Johann Emerich of Speier for Luca Antonio Giunta, 1499/1500, f LII (Music Library, University of California, Berkeley fM2I49.V4G7.) such designs as the F clef and the clivis and podatus of intervals larger than a second, as well as a smaller body size for such designs as the punctum, lozenge, and accidentals (see Fig 9 for sketched-in samples of body sizes; note in Fig 9b the flat printed below a note, and the bend of the rule) In at least one place the careless inking and resulting impression of the shoulder of the type below the typeface in relief corroborates a hypothetical body size of I.5 mm On f v of the Graduale, a virga was printed with the lower lefthand shoulder of the type visible next to the kerned stem (see Fig io, stave I) The distance from the top of the virga to the printed shoulder is 1.5 mm In such a typeface, the stem of the virga would be kerned; in fact, there are examples of virga stems bent at the bottom If the hypothetical size of I i.5 mm is correct, some multiple of that number would make up the size of the staff between two lines of text type The distance between descender and ascender for the staff (the text type appears to use a face that covers
FIG 7 Graduale Romanum Venice: Johann Emerich of Speier for Luca Antonio Giunta, 1499/1500, f LII (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Inc 1500.c3.) FIG 8 Sketches of the displaced type in Emerich's Graduale, I499 1500, f LII (Music Library, University of California, Berkeley fM2 49.V4G7.) the surface without shoulders beyond ascenders and descenders) is 38.5 mm and the actual size of the staff is 32 mm To speak now of Carter's "brickwork," a vertical group of three pieces of I i.5 mm plus one piece of 4 mm would make up a total of 38.5 mm (see Fig i i) The normal virga or its variants for the top and bottom of the staff are cast on the body so that the sign can be printed on any line or space of the staff or above or below the staff Because of the position of the text type, the virga on the space below the staff has no stem at all size of staff 32 mm size of staff plus alphabetic type body (descender to ascender) 38 mm FIG 9 a Hypothetical body sizes of music type R2 I b A flat printed below a note.
FIG o Graduale Romanum Venice: Johann Emerich of Speier for Luca Antonio Giunta, 1499/1500, f V (Music Library, University of California, Berkeley fM2 49.V4G7.) FIG I i Hypothetical body size of virga in Emerich's R2 I The same punch and matrix may have been used to cast all three virgas The process whereby the same punch and matrix were used to cast variant sorts was described in the eighteenth century by Fournier and was found by Harry Carter to be operative for the seventeenth-century Fell music type.2 A special type mold allowed, in addition to the normal horizontal adjustment, a vertical adjustment of the matrix in various positions; the position of the matrix determined where the design would appear on the face of the type and, as a result, where the musical sign would appear on the staff An earlier example of such a mold, with interchangeable stools to alter the head alignment of the matrices, exists today at the Plantin-Moretus Museum (GI 55) It was made by van den Keere in 1576 to cast 23 Ibid.
FIG. 12. Hypothetical body size of staff type for Emerich's R2 1. the large Spanish antiphonal type, a font which included kerned sorts for notes at the top and bottom of the staff. The system may well have been developed in the fifteenth century. Certainly the identical appearance of such distinctive characters as the porrectus at different positions on the staff suggests the use of a single punch.24 Two kinds of type were needed to print plainchant between two lines of text, one set for notes and one for staves. A strategy involving varying sizes of pieces of type may have been used to print the staff as well as the notes. Occasionally the shoulder of a piece of staff type is unintentionally printed and suggests the use of three equal pieces of staff type (body size of about 0o.5 mm) plus a piece of 7 mm to fill the space next to the text type. If an extra ledger line was needed above or below the staff and reached into the space of the text type (as in Fig. I2, top right, and in Fig. io) an additional fifth piece of staff type would be needed on a body the size of the text type, or 19.3 mm. Kerning was as common in Emerich's text types as in his music types. An unusually large repertory of kerned music types appears in R2 I (see the type specimen, Chapter VII); among the kerned types visible in Emerich's text type for the Graduale are f, the long s (to overlap following vowels), a form of
the t with a long crossbar (to overlap vowels), a form of the r and a form of the c (to overlap vowels and other c's (see Fig. 13). Early attempts to transfer manuscript designs to type relied on kerning to create the visual effect of linked letters (ligatures). To be sure, a font with kerned variants was expensive and time-consuming to design and cut as well as to set; the enormous fonts of the I450s (nearly 300 sorts for a text alphabet, plus frequent filed variants) had gradually been replaced by types with few kerned sorts and ligatures. Emerich was creating one of the first music types capable of setting the complex plainchant of the manuscript gradual and antiphonal, and it was natural that he should make use of complex kerning and variant forms of the same character to achieve his aim. Just as natural was its consignment to obsolescence when new types became available that were easier to set and allowed more music on the page, even though they lacked the capacity for printing complex neumes and liquescence. 24. Parker.. "Early Typefounders' Moulds," pp. 94-95 and plate i6A; see also fig. 3 in Poole's "Printing," p. 237. FIG. 13. Examples of kerned text types in Emerich's Graduale.
Evidence supporting the use of kerned characters in types like Emerich's large plainchant font can be sought in another important music type that, though not technically an incunabula type, was being created in Venice at almost the same time In a dissertation on Petrucci's Motetti della Corona (printed from 15 14 to 15 19 with the music type first used in Venice in 15 0 ), Stanley Boorman prepared a specimen of the music font and proposed a theory of kerned types to explain the intrusion of stemmed signs into the text type.25 A frequently used note in a mensural font is the minim or stemmed lozenge, outlined or filled in depending on the meter In Petrucci's type it has a standard height of I 1.2 mm on a five-line staff of approximately io mm, so the stems frequently intrude on the text type above and below the staff Boorman noted that "the tails appear to be particularly susceptible of being bent at a distance of 3.5-4 mm from the top of the note" and proposed that a reversible sort kerned at that point allowed the typesetter to combine text type and music type with less difficulty.
Emerich's last music font appears to have used a system of music type cast in multiple body sizes from several type molds and containing kerned and abutting variants for use at the top and bottom of the staff and for creating complex neumes by combining sorts The same general system may well have been used for many of the incunabula music types We have seen evidence for this hypothesis in a fortuitous instance of a displaced type, in somewhat later use of the system in the earliest extant music types, and in Petrucci's music Accounts from type designers' contracts and early type manuals, as well as the appearance of fonts in use today, provide evidence of multiple molds and large fonts More detailed discussion of particular fonts and the printed editions that use them can be found in Part II; especially interesting are the many instances of the careless printing of shoulders of type bodies and spacing material that confirm a hypothesis of varying body sizes A review of the limited evidence for the physical appearance of early music type prepares the way for a discussion of the history of the trade of typefounding as it relates to early Italian music type.
Music Typefounders
The trade of making types in the fifteenth century was never clearly described in contemporary treatises but can only be inferred from chance comments in colophons and archival documents of the next century.26 Evidence concerning typecasting in the fifteenth century was meticulously assembled by Konrad Haebler in an attempt to answer criticism of his classification of incunabula text types, a system that rests on the assumption that types were made by and in an individual printing establishment rather than purchased from an agent who had duplicate matrices for sale.27 According to Haebler, "it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that up to the year 1500 there were no two fonts of type the forms of which were absolutely alike."28 Recent scholarship has stressed that, while a font of type in the fifteenth century may have been unique, it might be used by another printer who had inherited it (an alphabetic font of Ulrich Han was used by Lupus Gallus in 1475, and Han's music type by Stephan Planck), sold (Francesco Girardengo sold alphabetic matrices to Giacomino Suigo), or, in unfavorable eco 25 Boorman, "Petrucci," pp 377-78.
26 The best modern accounts are in Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1969), and Konrad Haebler, "Schriftguss und Schriftenhandel in der Fruhdruckzeit," Zentralblatt fur Bibliothekswesen, 41 (1924), 8-I o04, translated as "Typefounding and Commerce in Type during the Early Years of Printing," Ars Typographica, 3 (1926), 3-35 27 Konrad Haebler, Typenrepertorium der Wiegendrucke, 5 vols 28 Konrad Haebler, The Study of Incunabula, trans Lucy Eugenia Osborne (New York: The Grolier Club, 1933), p 104.
nomic times, even rented.2 A publisher or commissioner of types might retain ownership and allow types to be used by different printers There is also some reason to believe that there were common sources for the types of many fifteenth-century printers It is part of the purpose of this chapter to show that by the 149os the typical Venetian printer could depend on free-lance professionals to create the complex fonts of Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, and music type that kept Venice in the forefront of the international book trade The first specialist in typefounding cited by Haebler is one Crafto (Kraft?), who stated in a legal document of Perugia in 1477 that a German named Steffen Arndes assisted him in making punches and justifying matrices ("ad limandum et aptandum punctellos matrices ad limandum dictas matrices"'; for filing down and adjusting punches for matrices and justifying said matrices).31 Crafto also taught Arndes how to "make a suitable mold for casting letters for printing books" ("unum instrumentum aptum ad jactandum litteras ad imprimendum libros") The training of Arndes is of considerable interest since he was one of a handful of printers to print the complicated neumes of the gradual in the fifteenth century (Graduale Suecicum, 1493) Arndes had formed a partnership with Crafto in the early 147os and is said to have written a manual on typecasting.32 At the time of the Perugian litigation Crafto was in Rome, where he had
been hired for ten months "to make punches and matrices for the printing of books" ("facere punctellos et matrices ad imprimendum libros") Thus we learn that almost exactly when the first music type was being made in Italy for Han's shop in Rome, a traveling type designer with his own tools was at work in that very city making a typefont on demand The alphabetic types used by Han have puzzling connections to other printed books that suggest a common type designer at work even earlier, in the I46os, at the time of the first printing in Rome The types used by Sixtus Riessinger in what may have been the first book printed in Rome, The Letters of St Jerome, bear a strong family resemblance to those of Han's second book, a Cicero of 4 XII 1468; the capitals are perhaps exactly the same.33 Although it has recently been stated that "only toward the middle of the [sixteenth] century did craftsmen like Garamond, Granjon and Guillaume Le Be become sufficiently famous and sought after to operate as free-lance punchcutters, and they were the first to do so,"34 it is clear from the example of Crafto that free-lance type craftsmen existed as early as the i470s Important to the discussion of early Italian music type are documents that mention Italian music printers who made type and others that refer to a music typecutter who was at the end of a long career
in 1513 Few details are known of their professional training and activities as fifteenth-century typecutters, so parallels are sought in the apprenticeships and careers of men who cut music type in the sixteenth century In an extraordinary document now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the son of an early type designer and punchcutter wrote down his recollections of men in the printing trade, including the music type designers Guillaume Le Be, Robert 29 Meyer-Baer (Liturgical Music Incunabula, p xxvii) described the Wenssler music type as "also found in the books of other houses: in Strasbourg at Gruninger's, later in Mainz at Schoeffer's, and in an anonymous Psalter The forms in use in Strasbourg appear to be identical with Wenssler's; in Mainz they appear to be slightly bigger and clumsier than Wenssler's but apparently cut after his model A comparison of the two fonts, side by side, would reveal whether they are of the same size." It is one thing to speak of the similarity of types; it is another to say they are the same 30 Carter, View of Early Typography, pp 57-58, 60-61, io4-6 3 The source of Haebler's information is a document quoted in Adamo Rossi, L'arte tipografica in Perugia (Perugia: Boncompagni, 1868), p 24 32 M Faloci Pulignani, "L'arte tipografica in Foligno nel secolo XV." La Bibliofilia 1 (1899-1900), 283-90. 33.
A Leaf from the Letters of St Jerome, First Printed by Sixtus Reissinger [sic], Rome, c.1466-1467, ed Gilbert Bennett; historical essay by Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams; bibliographical essay by John L Sharpe III (Los Angeles: Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, 198 ) Sharpe (pp 17-19) suggests an independent typecutter but dismisses the possibility "since the independent type cutter is usually considered a later development within the printing business and dependent upon a larger community of printers than was so recently come to Rome in the 146os." The resemblance to the Cicero is discussed in Mariano Fava and Giovanni Bresciano, La stampa a Napoli nel XV secolo, 2 vols and Atlas, Sammlung Bibliothekwissenschaftlicher Arbeiten 32-34 (Leipzig, 1911-1913), I: 10-27; Victor Scholderer, "Sixtus Riessinger's First Press at Rome," The Library, ser 3, 5 (1914): 320-24 34 Heartz, Attaingnant, p 49.
Granjon, and Pierre Haultin.35 Guillaume Le Be (1525-1598), son of a papermaker in Troyes, was apprenticed in 1539 or 1540, at the age of fourteen, to the scholar-printer Robert Estienne in Paris There for the next five years he was taught all facets of the book trade: bookselling, printing, letter-founding, and lettercutting-the last two under the tutelage of respected craftsmen who have retained a place in printing history.36 The next step of his training was a five-year sojourn in Venice-in 1545 still one of the main centers of the book trade-where he cut types for a number of Venetian printers, especially the Hebrew fonts for which he became famous After finishing his Italian visit with a pilgrimage to Rome, Le Be returned to France, stopping in Geneva to see his master, Robert Estienne In Paris he began a decade of free-lance type design for Parisian publishers that included working in i55 for the typecutter Claude Garamond.37 Products of that decade include seven music types, four of them for Adrien Le Roy and Robert Ballard, to print plainchant, mensural music, and keyboard and lute tablature.38 In his mature years Le Be was an international merchant with an inventory of punches and matrices that included twenty-three sets of punches or matrices or both of music type: seven of plainchant (including one of his own design, a 4° antiphonal), fifteen of mensural, and one of tablature.39 The second French typecutter whose career is known in sufficient detail to contribute to our understanding of the early period of the trade is
Robert Granjon (5 I 3-ca 1589), son of a printer and bookseller Granjon was apprenticed to a goldsmith (probably in Lyons) and "when he had learned that calling, he set himself to work at various faces of type He began in Paris about I545 and even before in 1570 he left Paris and went to live at Lyons Afterwards he went to Rome, which he reached in December 1578, where he worked for the Cardinal de' Medici at Arabic types."40 During the visit to Rome, Granjon apparently also cut a single-impression plainchant font and with it printed Guidetti's octavo Directorium Chori (I582).41 Previously, Granjon had cut three mensural types purchased by Plantin.42 A third typecutter, Pierre Haultin, "may have begun about I500 and finished his apprenticeship about 51 o The first matrices on which he worked were for a Pica or Small Pica Greek He began the punches in 1530."4 The first documentary evidence we have of Haultin is a bond of 1547 by Nicolas Duchemin to pay him for punches and matrices for music type.44 Although Fournier credited him with making "the first [French mensural music] punches about 1525," that distinction is now
35 The document has been published in French and English by Harry Carter with a foreword by Stanley Morison as Sixteenth-century French Typefounders: The Le Be Memorandum, Documents Typographiques Francais 3 (Paris: Paul Jammes, i967) The first part of the document was written by Guillaume Le Be II about 1643 and the second part was copied in the hand of Jean-Pierre Fournier l'Aine about 1730, when the Le Be foundry was acquired by the Fournier family 36 Ibid., pp 32-33 37 Annie Parent and Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, "Claude Garamont: New Documents," The Library, ser 5, 29 (1974): 86 38 Three of the Ballard types are described and reproduced in the type specimen now in the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale (Dept des Mss., n.a.f 4528) and are printed in facsimile in Omont's "Specimens de caracteres," pp 273-83 and plate 3 A leaf of the "Musique grosse" annotated in Le Be's hand is reproduced in Heartz, Attaingnant, plate 14 The other types are mentioned in The Le Be-Moretus Collection of Fragments c.1599, ed H D L Vervliet and Harry Carter, Type Specimen Facsimiles 2:18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), p 12 39 The inventory of the Le Be Foundry was made sometime after 1617 and is now in the Paris Archives Nationales, Minutier Central des Notaires, etude 65, laisse 229 Morison reproduced the document in L'Inventaire de la Fonderie Le Be; the music material appears on pp 22-25 40 Sixteenth-Century French Typefounders, pp 32 and 44n.39· 41 Vervliet, Robert Granjon a Rome, pp 33-35 42 Punches and matrices of the three types remain today in the Plantin-Moretus Museum; a specimen of two of Granjon's music types made from extant matrices appears in
Heartz, Attaingnant, p 47, and Parker, Melis, and Vervliet, "Typographica Plantiniana II," ST7oa The first is a medium-sized mensural font cut before 1565. The second is a civilite or gothic cursive used in printed books in 1558 and 155943 Sixteenth-Century French Typefounders, p 31 Hendrik Vervliet questions Le Be's date and suggests the early i53os for completion of the apprenticeship: "Les Canons de Garamont: essai sur la formation du caractere romain en France au seizieme siecle" in Refugium Animae Bibliotheca: Melanges offerts a Albert Kolb, ed Emil van der Vekene (Wiesbaden: Guido Pressler, i969), p 493 44 Francois Lesure and G Thibault, "Bibliographies des editions musicales publiees par Nicolas du Chemin," Annales Musicologiques i (1953): 270-71.
thought to belong to Attaingnant.45 Haultin's career, too, combines the professions of the typecutter who made several fonts of music type and the printer who used his own music type In 1514 after finishing an apprenticeship in Paris-perhaps with Philippe Pigouchet, whose daughter he married-Pierre Attaingnant (ca I494-155I) became a bookseller with a printing press for hire He began his career printing dominoes, excommunications, and pardons but soon inherited all or part of the business of Pigouchet, who had died by I518.46 In April 1528 appeared the book that would transform music printing, the single-impression music book Chansons nouvelles, which used a music type with the notes and staff lines engraved on one punch Attaingnant also cut what must have been the first single-impression plainchant type (forty punches), perhaps completed even earlier than the famous mensural type.47 The type was still extant for a type inventory in the seventeeth century, but there are no surviving printed sheets from it At that time it was still the custom to print plainchant in red and black, and therefore a single-impression type was impractical What parallels can we draw for the training of the fifteenth-century music type designer? A standard apprenticeship in a printing shop or with a goldsmith would prepare a professional music type
designer for his craft Italy's international importance in type production is clear from the fact that it was not uncommon for a newly apprenticed sixteenth-century craftsman to make a trip to Italy While the distinction between printer and type designer was often blurred, as for Attaingnant and Granjon, who are remembered today primarily for their types, others would be trained from the beginning as specialists in type design and punchcutting, a mature profession in the sixteenth century There is some evidence that in the fifteenth century music printers produced their own type Stephan Arndes learned the craft in the 1470s for a career that continued into the next century Antonio Zarotto, the first printer in Milan, signed contracts in 1472 that obliged him to cast enough Latin (gothic and roman) and Greek types to outfit seven presses.48 Therefore he must have had the ability to make the small font of Ambrosian plainchant types used in his Rituale Ambrosianum (about I488) and Missale Ambrosianum (i March I488) In 1478 in Basel, the music printer Michael Wenssler joined the guild of moneychangers, goldsmiths, and founders; he had been since 1474 a member of the Safranzunft, the merchants' guild By 1478 he had apparently become his own typefounder.49 Wenssler began printing books first with staves and then, in 1488, with the music type of Richel.50 Other printers were not averse to buying types Christoph Valdarfer, another Milanese printer, attached a
specimen of a roman type to a printing contract in 1472; the agreement stipulated that he would retain possession of the type after the book was completed.5' While working in Basel, he obtained from Richel two fonts of text type that he later used in his own shop.52 He may have commissioned in Basel the first Ambrosian plainchant type, which appeared in his Missale Ambrosianum, 15 March 1482, the first dated music printed in Milan As late as 1492, in the small university town of Pavia, Francesco Girardengo was making and casting his own type On the date ending a thirteen-year partnership with the wealthy merchant Giovanni Antonio Beretta, Girardengo paid 6,ooo ducats and retained the tools of his profession: metal, presses, forms, matrices, files, and letters.53 He then made a 45 Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune, Traite historique et critique sur l'orgine et les progres des caracteres de fonte pour l'impression de la musique, avec des epreuves de nouveaux caracteres de musique, presentes aux imprimeurs de France (Berne: Fournier, 1765); Heartz, Attaingnant, pp 49-58 46 In his Tresor de la langue francaise of 1606 Jean Nicot defined dominoes as pictures and portraits cut in wood or copper and printed and painted on paper ("dominos, c'est i dire des images et oeuvres de portraicture peintes et imprimees en papier, el: gravees en bois ou cuivre," quoted in Heartz, Attaingnant, p 36).
47 Heartz, Attaingnant, pp 57-58 For reproductions of the pertinent pages of Le Be's inventory, see Appendix 7, plates 6-7 48 Arnaldo Ganda, I primordi della tipografia milanese: Antonio Zarotto da Parma (147i1-507) (Florence: Olschki, 1984), p 34 49 Haebler, "Schriftguss," p 89 5o Kathi Meyer-Baer, "Der Musikdruck in den liturgischen Inkunabeln von Wenssler und Kilchen," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1935): 117-26 5i Haebler, "Schriftguss," p 86 52 BMC VI: xxiii 53 Archivio Notarile di Pavia Bartolomeo Strada fq Antonio, io November 1492: "stagna, torcularia, matres, forme,
new agreement to rent space in Beretta's house for a printing shop and living quarters, plus a room upstairs for typefounding Girardengo sold types as well, for records indicate that the Turin printer Giacomino Suigo bought matrices from him.54 Documentary evidence shows that by the I49os there were printers in Venice who commissioned type from technical collaborators who cut punches and cast type In I50o the printer Aldo Manuzio praised Francesco Griffo da Bologna as the typecutter of his elaborately kerned Greek and 55 Latin cursive types Particularly relevant to the history of Italian music type is the group of Venetian documents that mention a typefounder referred to as either Jacomo Ungaro (Hungarian) or Jacobo (Jacomo) Todesco (German), gettator de lettere On 2 November 1498, the diminutive form, Jacobino Todeschino, was used by the witness of a death certificate for Francesco del Prestade Bormi, another typefounder (gittator litterarum).56 In 1506 Aldo Manuzio's first will refers to Jacomo Todesco, gettator de lettere, and in 5 I3 Jacomo Ungaro requested a fifteen-year privilege for mensural music Can we be sure that these documents refer to the same man? In 1889 Castellani first pointed out the likelihood that the German and Hungarian Jacomo were the same person, since Hungarians who came to do business in Venice were treated on a par with Germans and lived at the same house, the Fondaco
dei Tedeschi.57 The boundaries of Hungarian and German territory had been in flux throughout the fifteenth century, as had those between Hungary and Venice.58 The distinction between German and Hungarian must have been hazy for many inhabitants of borderlands Jacomo Ungaro's ties to either Hungary or Germany would have been weakened by long residence in Italy In his petition for the music type privilege Jacomo Ungaro claimed residency in Venice for forty years, verifying his presence in the city at the same time as Jacomo Todesco It seems an acceptable conclusion that Jacomo Ungaro and Jacomo Todesco are one and the same man whose background was seen by Italians simply as transalpine Aldo Manuzio's will gives to Jacomo the appellation magistro, indicating some university education 27 March I5o6 Let there be distributed two hundred and fifty ducats to ten young women of marriageable age, twenty-five (25) ducats each; the said young women being four daughters of my compatre Master Jacomo Todesco, typefounder 59 The term compatre has often been translated as "godfather."60 Since Aldo was born about 1449 in Bassiano, a little town near Rome, such a relationship suggests that Jacomo spent most or all of his life in Italy However, the fact that the will uses the term compatre in reference to several individuals
(for the full document, see Appendix i, no i) makes it more likely that the term designated a close business associate As the father in I506 of four unmarried daughters to whom Aldo was bequeathing small dowries, the typecaster was at least middle-aged and probably not very well-to-do On 26 September 5 13, Jacomo Ungaro submitted a petition to the Venetian Senate requesting a fifteen-year privilege to print mensural music Under the terms of a Venetian privilege, which could run from one to twenty-five years, other printers could be forbidden to print a certain title, or to print or sell a title, to imitate a type, or even to import a certain title into the republic The privilege might be granted for one title, a group of designated titles, or whole genres such as small mis plani, littere, tellaria, et omne et totum quicquid est et operatur ad usum stamparie librorum"; as cited in Tullia Gasparrini Leporace, "La societa Beretta-Girardengo (1479-1492) nei documenti inediti coevi," La Bibliofilia 50 (1948): 45 54 Ibid., p 34 55 Albano Sorbelli, "II mago che scolpi i caratteri di Aldo Manuzio," Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1933): 117-23 56 Haebler, "Schriftguss," p 93.
57 Carlo Castellani, La stampa in Venezia dalla sua origine alla morte di Aldo Manuzio seniore (1889; reprint Trieste: LINT, 1973), p 66n.2; Henry Simonsfeld, Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venedig, 2 vols (1887; reprint Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1968), 2: 81 58 Gyorgy Szekely, "Les Facteurs economiques et politiques dans les rapports de la Hongrie et de Venise a l'epoque de Sigismond," in Venezia e Ungheria nel Rinascimento, ed Vittore Branca (Florence: Olschki, 1973), pp 41-45 59 See Appendix i for full text 60 Recently by Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p 48.
sals.61 Some privileges have certainly disappeared, and some of the titles that were privileged were never printed In Ungaro's petition he claimed to have discovered how to print mensural music in the city of Venice where he had resided for forty years: Because it is the habit of your most Illustrious Signoria to remunerate those who contribute to this famous city some useful and ingenious invention, therefore your most faithful servant Jacomo Ungaro, cutter of letters and inhabitant of this most excellent city for forty years, having discovered the way to print measured music, and fearing that others, as happens, may reap the fruit of his labors, begs your Excellency that you be pleased to grant him the favor that no one else may print or have printed the said measured music either in this city or in its provinces for the next fifteen years, nor bring books printed elsewhere to sell in this city or subordinate lands, under penalty of losing all the books and ioo ducats for every time that it occurs.62 Ungaro was concerned that others would "harvest the fruits of his labor" after he had "found the way to print measured music" because the previous privilege holder, Ottaviano Petrucci, was now absent from the Venetian Republic Petrucci's twenty-year privilege, awarded in 1498, would have had five years to run, but by April 511 he had moved back to Fossombrone, his home in the Papal States, no doubt because of the turbulence caused by the war being waged against the republic by the
League of Cambrai (1509-1513) Petrucci had probably already applied for the privilege to print music in the Papal States that was awarded to him on 22 October 15I3, verifying his intention to remain in Fossombrone.63 The Venetian Senate awarded Jacomo the privilege on the condition that it not prejudice the previous holders ("cum hoc ne praejudicetur concessionibus, si quae forte factae fuissent antehac").4 The Senate's award indicates their support of his claims of residency as typecutter for forty years and invention of the way to print mensural music There is no evidence that Jacomo, a typecutter, wished to use the privilege to print music books Having lived in Venice for forty years and with four figliole by I506, Jacomo must have been reaching old age It is more likely that the privilege was sought to prevent others from printing or bringing printed music books to offer for sale in Venice or its provinces Rather than state that "Ungaro never availed himself of his short-lived privilege,"65 it is more accurate to assume that the privilege was effective in preventing others from "harvesting the fruits of his labor." Petrucci's type was not reused in Venice Jacomo Ungaro may have died by June 15I4, the filing date of a petition by Petrucci's publishers to renew his former privilege, not just for mensural music as in Ungaro's petition, but also for lute and keyboard tablature Another intimation of Ungaro's death is his absence from Aldo's second will
of January I 515 The petition of 1 514 was made on Petrucci's behalf by publishers Amadeo Scoto and Nicolo di Raffaele, since the music printer was by then in Fossombrone The petition asked that the Petrucci music privilege, which had been unused for four years, be extended for Petrucci's former partners for five years; if still valid, the original twenty-year privilege would have run to 5 i8 It sought to prevent others from printing music and from "carrying or having carried or selling those kinds of books in this country or subordinate lands." Scoto and Raffaele were portrayed as financial backers: 26 June 1514 And because in the printing of the said works [of mensural music] much capital was necessary and was not forthcoming, the said Octaviano unable to provide it being a poor man, he took as partners S Amadio Scoto bookseller 61 Some two hundred can be found in Fulin, "Documenti," pp 84-212, and "Nuovi documenti," Archivio Veneto 23 (1882): 390-405; Richard Agee, "The Privilege and Venetian Music Printing in the Sixteenth Century," Ph.D diss., Princeton University, 1982, focuses on music privileges 62 Fulin, "Documenti," no 189 Catherine Chapman, "Andrea Antico," Ph.D diss., Harvard University, 1964, p 23, gives a translation of the document For the complete document in Italian, see my Appendix i, no 3 Agee's translation of the reference to Ungaro as a woodcut artist and printer seems unwarranted ("The Privilege," p 43).
63 Boorman, "Petrucci," pp 381-82, Appendix 4; Claudio Sartor , Bibliografia delle opere musicali stampate da Ottaviano Petrucci, Biblioteca di Bibliografia Italiana i8 (Florence: Olschki, 1948), p 17 The document as quoted by Sartori lacks two phrases 64 Fulin, "Documenti," no 18 65 Martin Picker, "Petrucci, Ottaviano," New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 14: 596.
and Ser Nicolo de Raphael who at very great expense, and the most diligent and vigilant industry, printed many and diverse volumes of the said books hoping to gain some profit, but because of the war and turbulence they have not been able to sell the said printed works and their capital is tied up, to their most great danger and loss.66 Despite their earnest protestations of interest in printing music, the seekers of the 5 14 privilege were probably looking to protect their capital investment in the still unsold Petrucci editions Amadeo Scoto, nephew of the fifteenth-century music publisher Ottaviano Scoto (d 1498), had inherited part of his uncle's flourishing publishing business He was not a printer and had no further known connection with music publishing.67 Raffaele, nearly blind in I5I4, was also a source of financial support rather than printing expertise Another reason for concern to reestablish Petrucci's privilege was the appearance on the horizon of Andrea Antico, who had been printing music from woodcuts in Rome with the help of capital from Roman members of the Giunta and Scoto families since i 5 o and who was to come to Venice after Petrucci received privileges in the Papal States for mensural music and tablature Ungaro's 1513 privilege is fundamental to the history of music printing Not only does it award to Jacomo the credit for Petrucci's influential mensural type, it suggests that he, already known to
have been a professional typecutter in Venice for decades, was capable of designing the other music fonts that made their first appearance there Petrucci's privilege had said that he had discovered how to print mensural music "and consequently plainchant much more easily." Only four men are known to have been in the business of making types in Venice by 1513: Jacomo, Francesco Griffo, another Hungarian named Andrea (Sigismund) Corbo (Corwin) who was an "inzisor literarum,"68 and Francesco del Prestade Bormi The time has come to propose that a good share of the success of music printing in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century is owed, if not to Jacomo himself, then to fellow craftsmen like him who provided the music type for the production of the liturgical books that entered the international market from Venice Support for Jacomo's claim to have "found the way to print mensural music" also comes from indications that all of Petrucci's type was cast before he left Venice for Fossombrone Boorman pointed out that in Petrucci's Fossombrone imprints the ligatures grow fewer, and some ligatures are replaced altogether by two sorts butted together There is the occasional appearance of "ugly minims with much heavier tails apparently cast from a new matrix, unless, as seems more likely, the original had become distorted."6 Such evidence indicates that Petrucci was not the owner of the matrices of his famous type and was not personally responsible for their design and production Only a copy of Jacomo's will could tell us whether the typecutter owned the music punches and matrices After
Petrucci's death in 1523, his widow apparently sold some of his type to a Gabriele Ceccolino, who, however, made no use of any music type.0 Evidence of Jacomo's role in the development of Petrucci's mensural type calls for a reexamination of the first font of mensural type, used in Venice in 1480 The craftsman would then have been in residence for seven or eight years A foreigner was allowed to trade freely and was exempt from certain customs duties when he became a citizen after residence for fifteen years or for eight years after marriage to a Venetian.71 If Jacomo had 66 Fulin, "Documenti," no 193; translated in David Gehrenbeck, "Motetti de la Corona: A Study of Ottaviano Petrucci's Four Last-known Music Prints (Fossombrone, I514-15I9), with 44 Transcriptions," Ph.D diss Union Theological Seminary 1970, p 53 For the complete document, see my Appendix i, no 4 67 La musica, ed Guido M Gatti and Alberto Basso, 2 vols in 6 (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, I966-I971), 2: Io7I 68 Jozsef Fitz, "Ungarische Buchdrucker des XV Jahrhunderts im Auslande," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (931) : I 15 69 Boorman, "Petrucci," pp 95-96.
70 Augusto Vernarecci, Ottaviano de' Petrucci da Fossombrone, p 226 Jacques-Charles Brunet tells us that the 1521 Motetti libro primo and Motetti liber quartus of Torresano and the 1520 Motetti noui & chanzoni francoise of Giunta were printed by Andrea Antico in Petrucci's type: Brunet, 3: cols 1426-27 Chapman ("Antico," p 91 and Appendix) concluded that the music was printed from woodblocks cut by Antico himself 7 i Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), pp IOO-IoI.
married upon arrival, he would have been ready to start a type business in 1480, the year in which six pages of mensural music were printed with the first mensural type in a Grammatica written by Francesco Niger and printed by Theodor Franck of Wurzburg (M1; for reproductions of two of those pages and the type specimen, see Chapter VII) There are striking resemblances between the first mensural font and that of Petrucci: an identical pausa of slightly more than a half circle, the distinctly pointed breve and long, the long stem of the long (in variable sizes like Petrucci's), and the calligraphic distinction of thick and thin sides of the minim Even more surprising is the similarity in size: in both fonts the long has a notehead of about 2.5 mm square, the semibreve is 3.8 mm high, and the pausa is 2.5 mm high The pointed noteheads are not accentuated as in Petrucci's type, and the stems of the long are not quite straight Frequent impressions of edges of type shoulders provide evidence for the technique visible in fonts of the i49os of casting a musical sign on a small body that can be positioned to print at the level of different spaces or lines of the staff by the use of spacing material above and below the sort The craftsman responsible for the 1480 Venetian font could well have been the resident music typecutter who cut the next mensural font at the end of the century for Petrucci Petrucci's awareness of interest in a system of printing mensural music both in and outside of Italy
is indicated by a phrase in his privilege of 25 May 1498: "At great expense and with most vigilant care, he has discovered that which many, not only in Italy but also outside Italy, have long sought, which is to print mensural music in a very convenient manner."72 Did Petrucci's publishers finance the invention claimed by the type craftsman Jacomo Ungaro in his privilege of 5 13 ? If Jacomo were responsible for the music type used in the early 1480 printed mensural music, as well as Petrucci's, he would certainly qualify as one who had long sought a manner of printing mensural music, perhaps both inside and outside Italy The Venetian plainchant fonts that appeared in Venice in the last decades of the fifteenth century include some repetitions of design Some characters reappear in different fonts in what seem identical designs; for example, the narrow and elegant flat of Petrucci's type is like that used by Hamman in his first gothic font of 1498, where it is a bit out of character The appearance of two innovative mensural types in Venice just a year apart-Emerich's black mensural type in i500 (R2i) and Petrucci's white mensural type in I50I suggests a single creative designer, especially since Petrucci's font is linked by name to a professional Since the mensural types in R2 match the body size of the plainchant type and would have been cast in the same molds, would not the same craftsman very likely
have cut the entire font, plainchant and mensural? Ungaro, having certainly cut Petrucci's font and perhaps having had a hand in Emerich's mensural type and by extension his plainchant type, could well have cut other plainchant fonts as well Thirty-eight music types were used in Italy in the fifteenth century, twenty-five of them in Venice It seems likely that many were the products of a very few craftsmen who specialized in music type 72 Fulin, "Documenti," no 81 For the complete document, see Appendix i, no 2.