oa Seeing and Singing: Interpreting Decoration in Italian Music Manuscripts c. 1500

Many music manuscripts surviving from the period c. 1460-1530 in Italy are adorned by some level of decoration. Such decoration has often proved helpful in connecting manuscripts to particular patrons and institutions, and in suggesting the ways in which a manuscript may have been used. In this article I suggest that, by reconstructing some of the visual habits and assumptions that musicians in Renaissance Italy would have shared, it is possible to address a different kind of question: the relationship between visual decoration and the act of reading music from a manuscript. With the help of case studies, I will argue that visual decoration had the capacity to intervene in musical performances undertaken from a manuscript, shaping aspects of their character and quality.