Giovanni Villani, A Biography of Francesco Landini

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Giovanni Villani, a Biography of Francesco Landini in
Liber de Civitatis Florentiae Famosis (Lives of the Famous
Citizens of Florence; c1382)
Musicians in the Middle Ages were often more than musicians. As mentioned at
several points in your textbook, composers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Philippe de
Vitry, and John Dunstable were musical polymathsindividuals skilled in a wide
variety of intellectual pursuits, including music. To be added to this list of diversified
musicians is the figure of Francesco Landini, as we learn from a contemporary Whos
Who of fourteenth-century Florence.
Giovanni Villani (c12751348) was a patriotic merchant of Florence who decided
to chronicle the personalities and deeds of the famous citizens of his native city.
After his death from the plague in 1348, his work was taken up by his brother,
Matteo, and the latters son, Fillipo. The following description of Landini was written by Fillipo, who surely knew Landini firsthand, as both traveled in the same intellectual circles in Florence during the second half of the fourteenth century. From
this biographical sketch we learn that Landini was the son of a painter; that he went
blind, evidently from smallpox, as a child; that he began to compensate for the
absence of this sense (sight) by emphasizing another (hearing) as he cultivated his
talent for music, particularly as an organist; and that despite his blindness he became
skilled in grammar and logic (two members of the trivium of the seven liberal arts)
as well as in writing poetry, both in Latin and in the vernacular Italian. Villanis
account does not mention Landinis death, which occurred in 1397, some fifteen
years after this sketch was written.
Scarcely was he halfway through childhood than fate blinded him by means of smallpox, though the art of music then turned him into a famous luminary. Cruel fate took
away physical light, but in place came the keenest sort of internal vision. This points
out the truth of the adage that it is best to browbeat those youths who have all their
senses, yet are miserably lazy, and honestly abuse them than allow them to fall into
idle sloth.
[Landini] was born in Florence, the son of a painter, Jacob, a simple and upright
man, who found slothful things distasteful. Having lived some of his life with sight,
blindness was especially painful, and so to relieve the horror of perpetual night he
began, perhaps, I think, as a gift from heaven, to compensate for cruel fate, to sing in
a boy-like way. As he grew older and began to understand what constituted sweetness of melody, he commenced to make music [canere coepit] first with voices, then
with strings and with the organ; and when he had achieved supreme mastery, to the
astonishment of all, he took up musical instruments that he had never seen, and
quickly manipulated them just as if he still had sight. He began to play the organ,
with such sweet skill, that he surpassed incomparably all organists whose memory
could be summonsed. All this cannot be related without fear of being charged with
fabricating a fiction.
The organ is a musical instrument composed of a great number of pipes and fabricated internally with many mechanisms, dissimilar parts, all linked together in the
most tenuous way, which can be broken with the least contact. But if the internal parts
of the organ, any one of which having been moved the slighted distance, had been
rendered dysfunctional, and because of this the air pushed through the pipes made dissonant sounds, Francesco would analyze the problem and restore the organ entirely to
its consonant, tempered sounds, fixing those things that had caused the dissonance.

2
Moreover, he knew how to make sing the lyre, lute, cittern, rebec, recorder, and
shawm, and all other types of musical instruments. And he made harmonious music by
mixing in the human voice with those of instruments that give a pleasant sound, vocally imitating them, so that he invented a third type of music full of joyful ingenuity.
In addition, he devised a new type of instrument, a hybrid of a lute and a psaltery
that he called Serena Serenarum (The Most Serene One), an instrument on which he
could create by means of agitated strings the sweetest melody.
I think it would be superfluous of me to recount how many and what beautiful things
in the art of music he accomplishedmen like me who write of passing events usually
forget that brevity is a grace. Yet it should be known that no one was ever more skilled
on the organ than this most excellent blind man. Indeed, all musicians would consent
to this fact and grant him the palm of victory in this art, as the most illustrious and
noble king of Cyprus did publicly in Venice [likely in 1364], bestowing upon him the
crown of laurel, just as the emperors used to bestow it on poets.
To all this, further praise may be added: he is fully skilled in grammar and logic, and
has crafted artful metrical poems and novellas. He has written many excellent things
in vernacular verse: an object lesson, may I say it, to the youth of effeminate Florence,
who, pursuing womanly finery, fall into lax turpitude, relinquishing their virile spirits.
Source: Translated from the original Latin as edited by Leonard Ellinwood in The Works of Francesco
Landini (1939), pp. 302303.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

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