Introduction

Myntha is a research database devoted to the visual and material culture of Italian secular cantata manuscripts. It brings together manuscripts, drawings and other forms of visual decoration and connects them with the people, places and collections involved in their production, circulation and later history.

Secular cantata manuscripts have traditionally been studied primarily as sources for music, poetry and performance. Yet many of these volumes are also carefully constructed visual objects. Drawings, decorated initials, coats of arms, lavish bindings, and other graphic elements may provide important evidence about the circumstances in which a manuscript was produced, presented, used, collected or subsequently dispersed. In some cases, these images can also be related to drawings and works of art that are now preserved independently of the manuscripts to which they were originally connected.

Myntha was created to make these relationships visible. It combines information from musicology, art history, iconography, codicology and provenance research within a single relational structure. Rather than treating the musical manuscript and its visual components as separate fields of study, the database allows users to move between manuscripts, images, artists, composers, scribes, patrons, collectors, libraries and collections.

The database therefore supports questions that cannot easily be addressed through traditional catalogues alone. Visual motifs can be compared across manuscripts; drawings can be associated with particular workshops, artists or artistic practices; provenance information can help reconstruct the movement and fragmentation of collections; and connections between objects now held in different institutions can be investigated together.

Myntha originated in Anna Bianco's doctoral research, Images for the Music: Drawing and Secular Cantatas, which examined the role of drawing in the production and reception of Italian secular cantata manuscripts. The database continues to develop beyond the original doctoral corpus as new manuscripts, images, attributions and relationships are identified.

Myntha is conceived as an evolving research environment rather than as a closed catalogue. Records may therefore contain different levels of certainty. Documented information is distinguished, wherever necessary, from proposed identifications, attributions, dates and reconstructions. These hypotheses reflect the current state of research and may be revised when new evidence becomes available.

The database also connects its records with relevant external resources, including library catalogues and specialist databases such as RISM, CLORI, RKD and Iconclass. These external references are intended to complement rather than replace the cataloguing and research information provided within Myntha.

By bringing together musical, visual and material evidence, Myntha aims to provide a tool for investigating the manuscript not simply as a carrier of musical notation and text, but as a complex historical object shaped by artistic practice, collecting culture and networks of production and patronage.