(b Piacenza, c1430; d Ferrara, Dec 1484). Italian dancing-master and dance theorist. Born into one of Piacenza’s leading noble families, he was educated in classical and modern languages, the theory and practice of military arts and of politics, and dancing. He spent the first 20 years of his life in Piacenza, except for five years when he studied at the Studio di Siena (c1443–8). In Piacenza he was a pupil of Domenico da Piacenza, whom he greatly admired and whose theoretical and aesthetic concepts are reflected in his Libro dell’arte del danzare (1455). Early in 1454 Cornazano joined the household staff of Francesco Sforza as ‘consigliore, segretario, o ciamberlano’ and teacher of his children. He dedicated the first version of his treatise to the young Princess Ippolita, whom he instructed in the art of dancing.
After Sforza’s death in 1466 Cornazano went to Venice, where he spent the next 11 years as military adviser to General Bartolommeo Colleone. After a two-year period of political activities in Piacenza, Cornazano was called to Ferrara by Ercole I d’Este in autumn 1479. Soon after his arrival he married Taddea de Varro, a member of an old noble Ferrarese family. He was held in high esteem; on his death he was buried in the Chiesa de’ Servi.
The Libro dell’arte del danzare (I-Rvat Capponiano 203) is the second of the important dance instruction books of the early Renaissance, preceded only by Domenico’s treatise. Of the original version only the dedicatory sonnet survives. It is impossible to say which parts of the second version, written about 1465 and dedicated to Sforza ‘Secondo’ (perhaps Galeazzo Maria), are from the first and which are later additions. Cornazano’s indebtedness to his teacher’s treatise is evident in an almost identical arrangement of theoretical material, beginning with the six principles necessary for all good dancing, followed by definitions and descriptions of the basic step units for each of the fundamental dance tempos, the individual steps and their tempo relationships. The dances themselves – eight balli (including the Balletto Sobria) with their mensurally notated music (in canto, in canto da sonare) and three bassadanzas – are also taken from the work of the older master (1 ed. I. Brainard in The Musical Manuscript Montecassino 871, ed. I. Pope and M. Kanazawa, Oxford, 1978, pp.531–3). The three tenori da bassedançe et saltarelli gli megliori et piu usitati degli altri are written in even note values similar to the notation found in Burgundian basse danse manuscripts but unlike that of most 15th-century Italian dance manuals. Their varying length makes them adaptable to different choreographies of the Italian repertory; they illustrate at least one of the procedures for providing musical accompaniment. Particularly noteworthy is Cornazano’s definition of balletto as a dramatic dance form ‘che po contenire in se tutti gli . . . movimenti corporei naturali, ordinato ciascun con qualche fondamento di proposito’, the first instance of the term’s use in a modern sense.
Libro dell’arte del danzare (MS, 1455 [inc.], 1465, I-Rvat Capponiano 203); Eng. trans. by M. Inglehearn and P. Forsyth (London, 1981); transcr. and trans. A.W. Smith: Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza, Dance and Music, iv (Stuyvesant, NY, 1995)
C. Poggiali: Memorie per la storia letteraria di Piacenza, i (Piacenza, 1789), 64–130 [with list of writings and transcrs. of documents]
A. Michel: ‘The Earliest Dance Manuals’, Medievalia et humanistica, iii (1945), 117–31
I. Brainard: Die Choreographie der Hoftänze in Burgund, Frankreich und Italien im 15. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1956)
D. Bianchi: ‘Tre maestri di danza alla corte di Francesco Sforza’, Archivio storico lombardo, 9th ser., ii (1962–4), 290–99
R. Meylan: L’énigme de la musique des basses danses du quinzième siècle (Berne, 1968)
I. Brainard: ‘Bassedanse, Bassadanza and Ballo in the 15th Century’, Dance History Research: Perspectives from Related Arts and Disciplines (New York, 1970), 64–79
W.T. Marrocco: ‘The Derivation of Another Bassadanza’, AcM, li (1979), 137–9
B. Sparti: ‘The 15th-Century Balli Tunes: a New Look’, EMc, xiv (1986), 346–57
D.R. Wilson: ‘“Damnes” as Described by Domenico, Cornazano and Guglielmo’, Historical Dance, ii/6 (1988–91), 3–8
D.R. Wilson: ‘“Finita: et larifaccino unaltra uolta dachapo”’, Historical Dance, iii/2 (1993), 21–6
INGRID BRAINARD