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Artist
Giovanni Mazzuoli (also known as Giovanni degli Organi) (c. 1360 – 14 May 1426) was a Florentine organist and composer associated with the late Trecento and the early Renaissance. Contemporary documentation places him in a sequence of important Florentine organ posts: he probably trained with his father Niccolò (organist at Orsanmichele until 1376), succeeded him at Orsanmichele in 1379 and held that position until 1412, served at Santa Felicita (1385–1390), and worked at Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore) from 1390 until his death in 1426; in his later years he was assisted at the organ by his son, Piero Mazzuoli. Mazzuoli’s modern reputation long rested on an apparent paradox: a substantial section of the early-fifteenth-century Squarcialupi Codex was prepared under his name, yet it contains no notated music for him, leaving an unusually conspicuous “absence” inside the most famous anthology of Italian Trecento polyphony. That picture has been significantly complicated by work on the so-called San Lorenzo Palimpsest (Florence, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, MS 2211), whose erased musical layers were made newly legible through multispectral imaging and subsequent scholarly editing; this has opened a much firmer basis for discussing Mazzuoli’s surviving music than was possible when the manuscript’s contents were largely unreadable. Older reference traditions also repeat that Nino Pirrotta proposed specific attributions to Mazzuoli under the names “Gian Toscan