composer. (Compare the “portrait” of Bernart de Ventadorn from the Paris 12473, Fig. 4-2.) Nowhere do
we get a more vivid sense of how consciously the poet-musicians of the trecento thought of themselves as
the inheritors and reanimators of the lost art of Aquitaine.
FIG. 10-2 Jacopo da Bologna’s portrait page in the huge retrospective anthology of trecento polyphony known as the
Squarcialupi Codex after one of its owners (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS. Palatino 87).MADRIGAL CULTURE
But unlike the troubadours these Italian composers worked as polyphonists from the beginning: indeed,
the earliest definition of madrigals, from a treatise on poetry dating from the early decades of the century,
calls them “texts set to several melodies, of which one is primarily of longs and is called tenor, while the
other or others is primarily of minims.”^3 And unlike the troubadours, but like the Parisian composers of
motets going back to the thirteenth century, the madrigalists seem to have practiced their art, at the
beginning, largely as an aspect of university culture.