The printing of Silvestro Ganassi’s Fontegara

The proposed article offers a survey of several matters pertinent to the printing of Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego’s Opera intitulata Fontegara (Venice 1535). The article is the direct result of the first ever study to engage in a comparison of the eight extant copies of Fontegara, which to date were thought to be identical. As the emergent printing business played a determinant role in the socio-cultural ascendancy, it is no surprise that musicians and artists such as Ganassi were interested in the possible outcome and reception of their printed works. Departing from Ganassi’s personal testimonies describing his concerns about the public approval (or disapproval) of his second and third treatises, Regola rubertina and Lettione seconda (Venice 1542 and 1543, respectively), the article examines the quantity and quality of the printing errors to be found in all extant copies of Fontegara, as well as the discrepancies between them.
Ganassi’s first treatise contains a significant amount of imperfections both in its prose and musical content. These errors could easily be explained and, perhaps quickly dismissed, as illustrative evidence of the inherent difficulties and the high degree of specialisation required for the production of a pioneering music book such as Fontegara. Nevertheless, the present article opts for an inversion of this approach, arguing that these printing and content errors can alternatively be viewed under a positive light, as the residue of a blueprint of the process of crafting and producing the most distinctive diminution treatise of the century. As such, the article values these flaws as sources of specific information that would perhaps remain unnoticed if only the perfect and faultless printed material is considered. In fact, significant information regarding the applied printing methods and editing techniques emerges from the examination of these numerous printing errors and of a limited number of variants of print. The discrepancies of the printed material, scattered throughout the different sections of the extant copies, are discrete testimonies of the alterations deemed necessary and considered feasible by the involved parties, who had to take into account the technical and financial constraints of the early sixteenth-century printing industry.
Additional information about the printing process also emerges from the study of the similarities between the particular musical notation displayed in the Fontegara prints and in the handwritten cadences (added by Ganassi to the copy preserved in Wolfenbüttel). In particular, some details of Ganassi’s autograph musical notation are apparently mirrored in the printed material, indicating a certain level of dependence between the printed version of Fontegara and a preparatory handwritten copy that possibly served as model for the preparation of the woodcut matrix.
Although the article does not engage in an in-depth discussion of the musical style, it takes into consideration that the majority of imperfections in the musical sections of the treatise is of a rhythmical nature (approximately seventy percent), and that, somewhat unexpectedly, the autograph cadences exhibit a comparable picture. The consistent presence of the rhythmical errors in both printed and handwritten sources leads to an alternative interpretation, which considers them as evidence of the troublesome process of crafting and composing such distinctive diminutions. The musical design of Ganassi’s diminutions is apparently challenging to all involved: author, engraver, printer and users of the treatise.
The article proceeds to focus on each individual variants of print. These variants are discussed in two groups. First, the most significant corpus of divergences is discussed, i.e. those which are the result of editing choices made during the process of print, which clearly aim to correct a few of the imperfections found both in the prose and the music of Fontegara. As expected, the method applied for the editing is directly linked to the specific nature of the relief methods applied for each section of Fontegara. Furthermore, the overview of the corrected errors also brings to light the miscellaneous nature of the eight extant copies, as they assemble, side by side, pages printed in different pressruns without any regard to a printing chronology.
The second group of divergences, i.e. the traces of posterior users of the treatise, is viewed as informative of the circulation and reception of the treatise. Apart from the information about the circulation of the treatise, the autograph additions to the Wolfenbüttel copy also present evidence of the commercial and, indirectly, the artistic value of Fontegara. Other later annotations, found in several other copies as well, are informative of the reception of the treatise by musicians and librarians. Last but not least, it is of great relevancy that Silvestro Ganassi was directly involved in different stages of the production of his Fontegara, a treatise he purposely named after himself. After a general sketch of the standard legal steps required to produce book in sixteenth-century Venice, the article examines the particularities of Fontegara’s privilege as well as Ganassi’s role in soliciting it, arguing that, also from this perspective, the treatise is rather extraordinary. Ganassi’s direct involvement also lays the ground for a survey regarding possible reasons why he ensured a rather substantial degree protection to his treatise, which extends beyond the typical terms of the privilege requests at the time. The particularities of the legal process and specific details of the treatise’s privilege confirm, from yet another viewpoint, the economical and the artistic value of Fontegara, not only to its author but also to its dedicatee, Doge Andrea Gritti and, by extension, to the city of Venice. The unparalleled dedication of the treatise to the Venetian head of state is not only an indication of the Doge’s patronage of Fontegara. It is a testimony of Gritti’s endorsement of the intellectual conceptualisation embedded in Fontegara (even if the process was not always flawless, as attested by the numerous imperfections present in the treatise). Recent research has demonstrated that Ganassi’s treatise displays many striking stylistic and textual similarities to two ancient Greek sources (Aristoxenus’ Elementa Rhythmica and Aristides Quintilianus’ De musica), brought to Venice due to the Bessarion’s Act of Donation. As an emulation of these ancient books, Fontegara makes significant contribution to Gritti’s cultural and artistic plans for the city of Venice, the renovatio urbis.