Arnold de Lantins

Who was Arnold de Lantins?

Arnold de Lantins was a Netherlandish composer of the late medieval and early Renaissance eras. He is one of a few composers who shows aspects of both medieval and Renaissance style, and was a contemporary of Dufay during Dufay's sojourn in Italy.

Very little is known about his life, except for a few years in the 1420s to around 1430. It is presumed that he was from Flanders or adjacent areas. In the early 1420s he was probably in the service of the Malatesta family in either Rimini or Pesaro, since Dufay mentioned him in the text of a rondeau which was written between 1420 and 1424. Lantins was in Venice in 1428 and Rome in 1431, in the latter city as a singer in the papal chapel choir, along with Dufay. He was only in Rome six months; after that he disappears from history. Rome was entering a period of turmoil related to the Conciliar movement after the death, in February 1431, of Pope Martin V; many musicians left at that time or shortly after, and Lantins may have been one of them.

It is not known for certain if Arnold de Lantins was a relative of Hugo de Lantins, a composer active at the same time, but since their works often appear together in collections and they seem to have been in the same geographical regions, it is not unlikely, however a sharp stylistic difference between the works of the two composers shows they can not be the same person. Earlier theories that there was a third "de Lantins," a certain Ray de Lantins, known from a single inscription in Munich, Bayerischestaatsbibliothek Mus. 3224, were shown to be wrong in 2012 by Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder, upon the discovery of a second, fuller inscription to "Raynaldus de lantins" of a Credo ascribed to Arnold de Lantins in two other sources. This ascription makes it extremely likely that Ray should be read as a variant of Arnold.