The cover of this album implies that the music within has something directly to do with
Leonardo da Vinci or the story of the Da Vinci Code book and film, which it does not. But the success of the whole Da Vinci Code phenomenon provides a reasonable excuse for a disc that introduces a bit of the music
da Vinci would have heard and known. Most people have at least a passing acquaintance with the masterpieces of Renaissance art and can recognize
Michelangelo's David, maybe
Botticelli's Venus, and certainly the grandmother of them all,
da Vinci's Mona Lisa. But Renaissance music has been a different matter, with even its greatest figure,
Josquin Desprez -- a nearly exact contemporary of
da Vinci, as the booklet for this disc points out, and a creative figure that an educated Renaissance courtier would have regarded as
da Vinci's equal -- nearly unknown except among the subgroup of classical listeners interested in the era. The reason, stated briefly, is that Renaissance music is more distant from modern sensibilities than is Renaissance art; the great leap toward a modern sound in music, the invention of functional harmony (chords that seem to move purposefully from one to another) awaited the flowering of opera in the early seventeenth century.