FIG. 12-1 Tinctoris at his writing desk, a portrait (possibly from life) by the Neapolitan artist Cristoforo Majorana from a late
fifteenth-century manuscript of Tinctoris’s treatises (Valencia, Biblioteca Universitaria).THE “TINCTORIS GENERATION”
The musical literati from whom Tinctoris drew his didactic examples are the very ones whose works are
found in practical sources throughout Europe irrespective of provenance. In the same preface to his book
on mensural proportions in which he called Dunstable the fountainhead of contemporary music and
consigned everything earlier to oblivion, Tinctoris cited an honor roll of his great coevals—a sort of
musical peerage. Pride of place went to Johannes Ockeghem and Antoine Busnoys, who in their joint pre-
eminence have, much like Du Fay and Binchois, haunted historical memory as a pair.
Ockeghem (d. 1497), the older of the two, came not from the East Flemish town of the same name, but
from St. Ghislain, near the large town of Mons in the French-speaking Belgian province of Hainaut to the
south. By 1443 he was a singer at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Antwerp, the leading church of
Flanders. A déploration or chanson-lament Ockeghem composed on the death of Binchois in 1460
suggests a master-pupil relationship with the leading composer to the Burgundian court. It was at the court
and chapel of the French king, however, that Ockeghem made his real mark, beginning in 1451. He
became a great favorite of Charles VII, who elevated him to high church rank as treasurer of the royal
collegiate church of St. Martin of Tours in the valley of the Loire, where the king had his winter palace.
Under Charles’s successor, Louis XI, Ockeghem became concurrently a canon of Notre Damede Paris. By
the time of his death he was surely the most socially exalted musician in Europe, and the richest as well:
he was a major rentier or urban property-owner, and rented out houses to many persons of means and
even eminence, including Jean Fouquet, the great miniaturist and portrait-painter, Ockeghem’s court
counterpart among artists.