Biographical and musicological certainties may be in short supply in the life and work of Josquin, but there’s no gainsaying the magnificence of the music recorded here: a programme of shorter works, most in unusual guise, to celebrate his 500th anniversary.

Although the lack of biographical detail is frustrating, hardly befitting Josquin's stature—his importance was recognized within his own lifetime—one particular detail intrigues: he was virtually an exact contemporary of one of the very greatest artists, and perhaps the most famous polymath, ever: Leonardo da Vinci. Josquin lived from the early 1450s to 1521; Leonardo from 1452 to 1519. Moreover, both lived and worked in Milan in the mid-1480s, in the employ of different members of Milan's ruling Sforza dynasty—Cardinal Ascanio Sforza in the case of Josquin, while Leonardo's patron (for much of his life) was Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. It's perhaps tempting (if wholly speculative) to imagine a meeting between these two cultural giants …

Our cover is a chalk and pastel sketch of the head of Christ, a study for one for one of Leonardo's most awe-inspiring and famous works: The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It's presumably this sketch which Walter Pater in his influential nineteenth-century study The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry admired for its 'union of tenderness and severity'—qualities also shared by much of Josquin's work—although, as so often with Leonardo, doubts of authenticity remain (another attribute he shares with Josquin).

Leonardo's biographers are fortunate in having been able to draw on Georgio Vasari's epic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, a sixteenth-century cornerstone of Italian art history, in which the exhaustive entry on Leonardo includes some of that work' purplest of prose: 'Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo …' There was, alas, no equivalent biographical dictionary of Renaissance composers. Five hundred years after his death, the details of much of Josquin's life may remain obstinately inconsistent, contradictory and ill-defined, but the magnificence of the music constitutes its own irrefutable evidence.