by other scholars, however, indicate that this chronol-
ogy confused the lives of two or three different people
of the same name. It is now accepted that the composer
Ciconia was born c. 1370 (apparently he was the il-
legitimate son of a priest), and he is documented as
a choirboy in Liège in 1385. By 1390, Ciconia was a
musician in Rome, during the reign of Pope Boniface
IX. In 1401, he went to Padua, where he served at its
cathedral and university until his death in 1412; one of
his chief patrons there was the great Paduan scholar and
prelate Francesco Zabarella.
Ciconia was not only a musician but also a poet and
theorist; he wrote several theoretical treatises. As a
composer, he left a substantial and signifi cant legacy of
surviving works: twelve movements of the mass, four-
teen polytextual Latin motets, two French virelais, four
Italian madrigals, and seven Italian ballate, plus several
miscellaneous and uncertainly attributed pieces. He was
trained in the French ars nova style but obviously also
encountered distinctly Italian ars nova practices, and
as a result he developed a progressive synthesis of his
own. In his French music, as well as in some of his Latin
polyphonic pieces, Ciconia demonstrates a commitment
to the intricate techniques of French ars subtilior, and in
his settings of Italian texts he assimilates the Italianate
lyricism of the Tuscan school but also infuses it subtly
with French structural procedures.
By contrast, Ciconia built his complex polyphonic
motets, with their multiple texts and their very northern
isorhythmic counterpoint, around individual melodic
lines, some of which were fi rst conceived as Italianate
songs. Through such compositions; Ciconia helped to
introduce the motet style in the Italian musical scene.
In his movements for the mass, he gave the upper parts
remarkable melodic freedom; and he was one of the
earliest composers to draw a clear distinction between
passages for solo singers and those for the full cho-
ral ensemble. In all, both in his technique and in his
Franco-Italian fusion of idioms, Ciconia is recognized
as the founder of what can be called a new “interna-
tional Gothic” style that would take shape during the
fi fteenth century. The elegant intricacy and beauty of
his music can still appeal to us. Ciconia’s career also
prefi gures a pattern of the following 150 years, during
which Italian courts and cultural centers were eager to
import and patronize “Netherlandish” Franco- Flemish
northerners (beginning with Guillaume Dufay), in
preference to native Italian musicians, as musical stars
and pacesetters.
A number of Ciconia’s compositions were written as
occasional pieces for specifi c patrons and situations. An
early canonic composition with a French text may have
been dedicated to Gian Galeazzo Visconti. One madri-
gal was written in honor of the city of Lucca; another
madrigal and one of the motets praise members of the
Carrara family, then reigning in Padua; one ballata.
may mourn the death (1406) in prison of the last Car-
rara lord. Among Ciconia’s motets, two are dedicated
to Francesco Zabarella; a third commemorates the sub-
mission of Padua to the Venetian republic, negotiated
by Zabarella after the overthrow of the Carrara (1406).
Another motet praises Doge Michele Steno, architect
of the Venetian takeover, and two others apparently
commemorate the installation of two Venetians as suc-
cessive bishops of Padua—Albano Michiel (1406) and
Pietro Marcello (1409). Still another motet may also
be in honor of Pietro Marcello or, alternatively, of the
antipope Benedict XIII.Further Reading
Clercx, Suzanne. “Johannes Ciconia théoricien.” Annales Musi-
cologiques, 3, 1955, pp. 39–75.
——. Johannes Ciconia: Un musicien liégeois et son temps, 2
vols. Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1960.
Fallows, David. “Ciconia padre e fi glio.” Rivista Italiana di
Musicologia, 11, 1976, pp. 171ff.
Fischer, Kurt von. Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento
und frühen Quattrocento. Bern: P. Haupt, 1956.
Krohn, Ernst C. “Nova musica of Johannes Ciconia.” Manu-
scripta, 5, 1961, pp. 3–16.
Reese, Gustav. Music of the Middle Ages. New York: Norton,
1940.
John W. BarkerCIMABUE (c. 1240–c. 1302)
The Florentine painter Cenni di Pepe (or Bencivieni di
Pepo) is commonly known by his nickname, Cimabue
connoting bullheadedness. He is generally said to have
marked the division between the art of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance by recalling painting to the task of
imitating nature. Cimabue was Florentine by birth, but
his activity stretched from Bologna southward to Rome
and Assisi, and west to Pisa. Biographical informa-
tion on Cimabue (the Ottimo commento on the Divine
Comedy; Villani, 1381–1382; and Vasari, 1550–1564)
is scanty and unrealiable, and specifi c documentation
of his work is almost non existent. The earliest archival
mention of Cimabue is from June 1272, when Cimabove,
picture de Florencia was witness to the signing of a legal
contract in Rome. Besides this, the only other documen-
tation of the artist comes from Pisa, thirty years later.
Between September 1301 and February 1302, Cimabue
was commissioned to complete the apse mosaic of Christ
Enthroned in the cathedral of Pisa (begun by Maestro
Francesco) with a fi gure of Saint John the Evangelist.
Also in 1302, Cimabue and a Giovanni di Apparecchiato
were commissioned to paint a panel (now lost) for the
hospital church of Santa Chiara in Pisa. The Saint John
in the cathedral of Pisa is Cimabue’s single surviving
documented work; it provides such a frail scaffold onCICONIA, JOHANNES