At the height of the career of the eminent Franchino Gaffurio (1451–1522), the German music theorist Dietrich Tzwyvel (d. 1516), in his Introductorium Musicae Practicae (Münster, 1513), praised Gaffurio's seminal scholarship to musica theorica as “fruitful and authentic” (“fructifera atque autentica”), and on account of his long-standing contribution to both musica theorica and musica practica called him an “outstanding professor of the two kinds of music” (“utriusque musicae professor eximius”). In addition to the contextualization of Gaffurio's immense contribution to music theory (Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought [1985]), the existing secondary literature on Gaffurio reveals a dearth of book publications solely devoted to Gaffurio, except for Franchino Gaffurio by Alessandro Caretta et al. (1951). The secondary literature has mostly been comprised of scholarly papers that have benefited from both modern facsimiles and English translations of his Latin trilogy published in Milan, comprising the Theorica Musice (1492; trans Kreyszig [1993]), Practica Musicae (1496; trans, Miller [1968]; Young [1969]), and De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum Opus (1518; trans. Miller [1977]), and from editions of individual compositions as well as a modern collected edition (ed. Lutz Finscher [1955, 1960]). The effort of Davide Daolmi, editor of Ritratto di Gaffurio, with this title attesting to the comprehensiveness and breath of this endeavor in positioning Gaffurio within the broader humanist historiography, is most laudable in assembling a volume with six papers that fill some serious lacunae in humanist scholarship, especially with regard to the detailed examination of primary sources pertaining to Gaffurio's music-theoretical discourse and compositional practice. The interconnections between both realms of inquiry are critical for a fuller understanding of Gaffurio's important position.

The volume opens with a comprehensive discography of Gaffurio (a first in Gaffurio scholarship) and an Italian translation of Lancinus Curtius's Latin poem to Gaffurio's De Harmonia. Davide Stefani's synopsis of Gaffurio's life, meticulously organized by date and city of sojourn and supplemented with the secondary literature for each venue, is followed by Martina Pantarotto's comprehensive overview of Gaffurio's vast library, with a breakdown of his holdings according to (a) autographs, both of his own writings and compositions (Librone 1–4); (b) copies of books (listed in alphabetical order according to place of preservation, divided according to manuscripts and prints; and (c) other important manuscripts, though not in his possession—as a supplement to the 1518 inventory of volumes in Gaffurio's possession, originally preserved at Lodi's Santa Maria Incoronata (Caretta et al., 117–18). In the detailed examination of Manuscript Parma, Biblioteca Nazionale Palatina 1158, Francesco Saggio explores an unusual facet of Gaffurio's scholarship: the juxtaposition of theorica musice and practica musice, domains of research that until the sixteenth century enjoyed separate coverage, with this particular manuscript, completed during Gaffurio's sojourn at Naples (examined in Gianluca d'Agostino's essay), where he met Johannes Tinctoris and laid the early foundation for his trilogy with the publication of the Theoricum Opus Musice Discipline (1480). In the Angelicum ac Divinum Opus Musice (1508), the topic of Denis Forasacco's study, Gaffurio, in disclosing the De Harmonia in truncation, takes another unusual step in the juxtaposition of Latin and Italian so as to enhance the readership. Daolmi rounds out the volume with an exceptionally broad range of iconographic documents, including woodcuts from Gaffurio's treatises (191–99) as well as two previously unpublished Latin wills of Gaffurio with Italian paraphrases of their content (174–89).

Notwithstanding a number of oversights—such as the erroneous identification of “Gaffurio 1492” (213) with the De Harmonia rather than the Theorica Musice, and Palisca as the English translator of the latter treatise—Daolmi has assembled a most interesting and worthy volume, unprecedented in scope, and thus suited as an excellent reference of familiar and novel information, allowing for manifold points of entry into the complex world of Gaffurio for both new and seasoned scholars. The volume offers a substantial enhancement of future scholarship, embracing musica theorica and musica practica, the two strands of inquiry that characterized the world of the Renaissance musicus in general and Gaffurio in particular, as alluded to by Tzwyvel in his laudatory comment more than five centuries ago.