Johannes Ciconia is thought to have been quite a lively creative personality; this idea comes not only from his music, but also from theoretical writings in which he espouses the most advanced humanistic ideals of his day. By transferring these ideals into music, ideals that had already spread in other disciplines, he almost singlehandedly liberated medieval music from aesthetic rigidity, thereby making way for the flowering of the musical Renaissance. Specifically, he believed that rather than showing obeisance to musical ideals originating in the church, a piece of music should derive its character from the text it sets, adhering to it in spirit as closely as the available musical techniques allowed. His famous ballata piccola O rosa bella was long of doubtful attribution until some new leaves of the "Mancini" codex (the manuscript that contains many of the surviving Ciconia works) made the attribution nearly certain by stylistically tying the piece to another Ciconia ballata, the magnificent O merce morte. O rosa bella and its companion, O merce, make for an instructive comparison. The two share advanced stylistic features such as chorus-like repetitions of melodic and text fragments. These become the auditory signatures of the pieces, ensuring instant recognition and memorability. But the overall character of O rosa is very cerebral. The shifts between dense syncopation among the parts and the recurring moments of motto-like straightforwardness cast a strange tone over the music so that every bar seems to ripple with cryptic nuance. The text was probably written by poet Leonardo Giustiniani, a well-known writer and a translator of Plutarch. Giustiniani was born in 1390, so it could not have been composed before 1405, and very likely not before 1410. If such reasoning serves us, O rosa bella was among the very last works Ciconia composed.

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