rowned Apollo of the Parnassus, in the Vatican Stanze. Another
of Beatrice's favourite singers was Angelo Testagrossa, a beautiful
youth who sang, we are told, like a seraph, and who, after the death of
this princess, accepted Isabella's pressing invitation to Mantua, where
he composed songs and gave her lessons on the lute. Testagrossa is said
to have sung in the Spanish style, which was much in vogue at Milan,
where a Spaniard named Pedro Maria was director of the palace concerts,
and is frequently mentioned in Bellincioni's poems. The priest Franchino
Gaffuri, as already stated, occupied the first chair of music ever
founded in Italy. Besides this master's works on music, another treatise
on harmony, composed by a priest named Florentio, and dedicated to
Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, is preserved in the Trivulzian Library, with a
fine miniature of Leonardo playing the lyre as frontispiece.

Both the Flemish priest Cordier, with the wonderful tenor voice, and the
accomplished master Cristoforo Romano were, as we know, among the
chosen singers who accompanied Beatrice on her travels. And there was
one more gifted artist, who, like Atalante Migliorotti, was both a
skilled musician and a mechanic, and whose whole life was devoted to the
construction of musical instruments of the choicest quality, Lorenzo
Gusnasco of Pavia. It was Lodovico Moro who first discovered the rare
talents of this "master of organs," as he was styled by his
contemporaries, and it was for Beatrice's use that he began to make
those wonderful clavichords and lutes and viols that made his name
famous throughout Italy. In his hands the manufacture of musical
instruments was carried to the highest pitch of excellence. He grudged
no labour and spared no pains to make his work perfect. The choicest
ebony and ivory, the most precious woods and delicate strings were
sought out by him; the best scholars supplied him with Greek and Latin
epigrams to be inscribed upon his organs and clavichords. In his opinion
both material and shape were of the utmost importance, because, as he
wrote to Isabella d'Este, "beauty of form is everything," "_perche ne la
forma sta il tuto_." The work of this gifted maker naturally acquired a
rare value in the eyes of his contemporaries. Sabba da Castiglione and
Teseo Albonese praise him as the man who, above all others, has learnt
the secret of combining lovely melodies with beauteous form, just as a
divine soul is enshrined in a fair