ABSTRACT
The Antonio Vivaldian repertory is, first and foremost, a manuscript repertory based on the huge Foa-Giordano collection in Turin, and anyone attempting to date Vivaldi's music must inevitably aim to accommodate the hundreds of hitherto undated manuscripts within a chronological scheme. With the orientation which rastrographical data provides, it is now more feasible than ever before to define the chronology of changes in Vivaldi's calligraphy. Any kind of chronology is better than no chronology at all, and the information revealed by an attempt to assemble one can only enrich our appreciation of the interrelationships between Vivaldi sources and thus between the compositions they contain. A full chronology of Vivaldi's handwriting, like that of any other person, varies from one document to another and not infrequently from one passage to another in a single document, yet at the same time it exhibits features common to several sources.
