DE BELDEMANDIS, PROSDOCIMO. – Theorist of music, born in Padua between 1370 and 1380. He studied in Padua and Bologna, becoming « magister artium » and « medicinae magister », respectively in 1409 and 1411. He held the chair of astrology, and perhaps also that of music, at the University of Padua from 1422 to 1428, the year of his death.
His theoretical work is not only a compendium of the theory of the entire Italian musical Trecento, which had begun with Marchetto da Padova, but also a look toward the new horizons of music, and especially of counterpoint, which was then emerging from the primitive polyphonic forms of « diaphonia », « organum » and discant. He theorizes on the rhythm and musical notation in use throughout the preceding century, extensively illustrating and vigorously defending that typically Italian tradition which was about to yield before the spreading wave of the French polyphonic art of the Quattrocento.
His treatises were partly published by C. H. de Coussemaker in the Scriptores, III, 1864-76, pp. 193-261; by L. Baralli and L. Torri, Il « trattato » di P. De B. contro il « Lucidario » di Marchetto da Padova in Riv. mus. it., 20 (1913), pp. 707-62; and by C. Sartori, La notazione italiana del Trecento in una redazione inedita del « Tractatus practice cantus mensurabilis ad modum Italicorum » di P. de B. (Firenze 1938), and partly remain unpublished in the libraries of Bologna, Lucca, etc.
(International Vatican Library)
DÉBORA – Central part of the «Canticle of D.» (Judg. 5, 6b–25a). Vatican Library, MS Vat. Hebrew 3, fol. 174v (13th century).