Singing in the Garden

This book has an interdisciplinary vision of music history: drawing on such masterpieces as Boccaccio’s Decameron and the frescos of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Andrea di Bonaiuto, Eleonora Beck explores the meaning of music for the society of the period. The picture that emerges from her study is of a musical culture that was clearly susceptible to the broad influences of its day and highly distinctive in both the sacred and secular domains, as the masterly compositions of Francesco Landini and Lorenzo Masini well illustrate.