Krautheimer, Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 4th ed. with Slobodan Curcic.
London: Penguin, 1986.
Mathews, Thomas. The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971.
CICONIA, JOHANNES
(ca. 1370–1412). Composer and music theorist born in Liège. Ciconia was probably the
most important single influence in the unification of Italian and French musical styles
that took place ca. 1400. His birth date, long thought to be ca. 1335, is now widely agreed
to have been nearer 1370 (most literature published before 1985 must be treated with
caution). By 1391, he was a singer in Rome; the texts of several songs, particularly Una
panthera and Le ray au soleyl, show that he must have been at the Visconti court in Pavia
later in the 1390s; from 1401 until his death, he was a beneficed singer at Padua
cathedral.
Ciconia’s musical works include at least ten Mass movements, eight motets, sixteen
Italian songs, and four French songs. The motets, in an apparently novel style, include
several written for important public events in Padua, including the episcopal installations
of both Albano Michele (1406) and Pietro Marcello (1409); others praise Francesco
Zabarella and members of the Carrara family. Among his early songs, the virelai Sus un’
fontayne includes exact quotes from three songs by Philipoctus de Caserta and stands as
one of the most complex examples of what is known as the Ars Subtilior. His
extraordinary last songs include settings of Leonardo Giustinian (O rosa bella and Con
lagrime bagnandome nel viso) and Domizio Brocardo (Lizadra donna). Here, there is a
virtually unprecedented degree of text expression, heightened by sequential repetition. Of
his two surviving music theory treatises, De proportionibus is a later adaptation of a
chapter from his larger Nova musica.
David Fallows
Ciconia, Johannes. Nova musica and Deproportionibus: New Critical Texts and Translations on
Facing Pages, ed. Oliver B.Ellsworth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
——. The Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark. Monaco: Oiseau-
Lyre, 1985.
Fallows, David. “Ciconia padre e figlio.” Rivista italiana di musicologia 9(1976):171–77.
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