Rethinking the chronology of the Italian Ars nova. I – Evidence of long-term continuity in the lauda repertoire

The San Lorenzo 2211 palimpsest, recently restored to a legible condition, includes compositions by authors active as late as the third decade of the fifteenth century and beyond, such as Ugolino da Orvieto (†1452). This evidence compels a reassessment of the conventional endpoint of the Italian Ars Nova, shifting it forward by several decades. Until now, the survival of Ars Nova repertory in fifteenth-century manuscript transmission had been attributed to a ‘retrospective’ cultural stance, exemplified by sources like the Squarcialupi Codex, where the manuscript’s material prestige further complicates efforts to distinguish living repertory from already historicized music at the time of compilation. Such ambiguities—largely absent from traditional lines of medieval musicological inquiry—are now challenged by the significant presence of Ars Nova-style settings attested in cantasi come laude formulas, which persist in notable proportions even into the late fifteenth century. This suggests a sustained popularity of that repertoire in oral performance. The main difficulty in assessing this persistence lies in determining to what extent, and in what ways, these pieces may have changed over time in performance compared to their originally notated forms. The survival of two distinct versions of the ballata Ben lo sa Dio—previously considered a late-fifteenth-century work but now attributed to Zaccara through evidence in SL—and other revealing cases highlight meaningful developments, including formal transformations, in the evolution of this repertoire.