YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

90 LUMINITA FLOREA
planets, and the heavenly – and still concentric – spheres inhabited by angels,
archangels, and, ultimately, by Christ in Glory. 49
In illustrated manuscript editions of Calcidius’s translation of Timaeus, and side
by side with cosmic schemes, one finds abundant visual material for interval proportions.
A case in point is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, where folio 53r
displays the colligatio elementorum (the conjunction of the four elements and four
qualities), while folio 53v shows a diagram of the octave and its subdivisions, with
the outermost semicircle demonstrating the diapason and the one concentric to it
naming the corresponding proportion, i.e., duple; at the next level, the two symmetrically
arranged semicircles represent the interval of diapente and its corresponding
proportion, the sesquialtera; finally, at the third level the pictor has drawn semicircular
shapes for tones and semitones. 50 In cases such as this one, the connection musicastronomy
is clearly perceivable; it might be surmised that the sharing of a common
conceptual territory between these two disciplines has caused the migration of circular
shapes from one leaf to the next.
Such interdisciplinary communion, however, is not explicit – yet the concept of
image borrowing still make sense – in manuscripts containing music theory tracts
only. A case in point are the rows and columns of tangential circles – twenty in all –
that were drawn on folios 21v–22v of the 1351 exemplar of the treatise Quatuor principalia
found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 90; they were meant to exhibit
solmization-syllable permutations and practically amount to a comprehensive imago
or speculum of the hexachord system. The manuscript Digby 90 contains the earliest
extant exemplar of the longer version of this treatise, also preserved in three manuscripts
from the first half of the next century: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley
515; 51 London, British Library, MS Add. 8866; 52 and Cambridge, Trinity College
Library, MS O.9.29 53 – the latter including a colophon giving 1421 as the date of
completion of the manuscript. The four manuscripts were clearly written by four different
scribes, but it is apparent that many, if not all, of the drawings in each manuscript
were executed by the scriptor of the text.
49 On a smaller scale, a detailed treatment of the four elements alone frequently employed the customary
“flattened” projection of the sphere to show water, air, earth, and fire surrounded by the symbols of
the twelve signs of the zodiac; see, for instance, a fifteenth-century French version of Bartholomeus
Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (Livre des Propriétés des Choses), in Paris, Bibiliothèque
Nationale, MS f.fr. 135.
50 The image can be seen by following the Bodleian Library link at Early Manuscripts at Oxford; see
also Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W 22 (Phillipps 1029): Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium
Scipionis, with several diagrams based on Calcidius; for a catalogue description, see RISM B/3/4, pp.
139–140.
51 For a catalogue description, see RISM B/3/4, pp. 107–109.
52 For a catalogue description, see RISM B/3/4, p. 33.
53 For a catalogue description, see RISM B/3/4, pp. 101–103.