"Un recercare che sono mi solo": the self-fashioning of a Renaissance lutenist

The Capirola lutebook, preserved at the Newberry Library of Chicago since 1904, is one of the most important sources of instrumental music of the early 16th century. Vincenzo Capirola (1474-after 1548) was a Brescian gentleman from a wealthy family with historical links to the nearby town of Leno. In his fundamental study of 1955, Otto Gombosi suggested that the scribe of the manuscript, who self-identifies as Vidal, was a pupil of Capirola trying to preserve the knowledge of his master; this idea is still accepted in musicological literature. By contrast, this essay re-examines a different reading of the name suggested in 1981 by Orlando Cristoforetti: VIDAL as a nickname for Capirola himself (VIncenzo DA Leno). If the scribe and the lutenist are one and the same person, the splendidly decorated manuscript can be viewed as the self-fashioning of a gentlemen and musician, one whose art contributes the definition of his identity according to the rules of aristocratic code of behavior. A fresh codicological examination of the manuscript deconstructs Gombosi’s dating of the manuscript (Venice, 1515-20), suggesting instead a wider range of time and place for its creation, which could have happened somewhere in the Venetian territories, possibly in Brescia, in the first half of the Cinquecento.