Bonaventura da Brescia

Bonaventura da Brescia was an Italian music theorist of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, about whom very little biographical information survives. His documented activity falls between 1487 and 1497, in the city of Brescia. He studied in Padua in 1487 and, it seems, spent the rest of his life as a friar in the Franciscan convent of Brescia.

At the request of a fellow member of the order, he wrote a brief treatise on the fundamentals of music, intended for humble and untrained clergy. Its first edition appeared in 1497 under the title Breviloquium musicale, but later editions knew it as Regula musicae planae. In forty-two short chapters, the work covers the Guidonian hand, the staff, the names of the notes, hexachords, clefs, mutation, the thirteen intervals, the modes and the intonations. Although the headings are in Latin, the text is largely in Italian, which may explain its wide circulation.

His classification of the modes and his treatment of the three semitones clearly depend on Marchetto da Padova, a debt he openly acknowledges in the Brevis collectio artis musicae, a manuscript of 1489 also known as Venturina, which gathers passages from Marchetto and other authors. His legacy lies chiefly in having condensed medieval theory into an accessible manual, although he still envisaged his readership as scholars.