makes the following comment: "This is the type
of piece performed in Italy up to Vecchi, as the 'Orfeo' of Poliziano
(1475), The Conversion of Saint Paul (Rome, 1484-92, music by Beverini),
Cephale et Aurore (music by Nicolo de Coreggio) 1487, Ferrara, etc."

This confusion of Poliziano's "Orfeo" with spoken drama interspersed
with intermezzi is unfortunate. There were no intermezzi at the
representation of this lyric drama. It was in itself an entire novelty
and nothing was done to distract the attention of the audience from its
poetic and musical beauties. We can hardly believe that there was any
close consideration of the fact that the work was an adaptation of the
apparatus of the sacra rappresentazione to the secular play. The
audience was without doubt absorbed in the immediate interest of the
entertainment and was not engaged in critical analysis or esthetic
speculations.

The costuming of the drama presented no difficulties. The skill already
shown in the preparation of the sacred representations and the festal
processions could here be utilized with excellent results. From 1470 to
1520, as we have already seen, was the period of the high development of
the sacred play. Only a few years earlier the civic procession, or
pageant, had shown in brilliant tableaux vivants the stories of the
Minotaur and Iphigenie. The study of classic art and literature had
blossomed in the very streets of Italy in a new avatar of the dramatic
dance. From every account we glean testimony that the costuming of these
spectacles was admirable. It must follow that so simple a task as the
dressing of the characters in Poliziano's "Orfeo" was easily
accomplished at that time when the Arcadian spirit of the story was
precious to every cultured mind.

There were no mechanical problems of stage craft to be solved. The men
who designed the cloud effects and the carriages for the floating angels
in the open air spectacles might have disposed of them with ready
invention, had they existed, but the theater of action, with its two
pictures standing side by side, was simplicity itself. But let us not
fall into the error of supposing that the scenery was crude or ill
painted. The painter of the scenery of the production of Ariosto's
"Suppositi," described by Pauluzo, was no less a personage than the
mighty Raphael. The accounts of the writers of the latter part of the
fifteenth and all of the sixteenth centuries are prolific in testimony
as to th