tion that he was summoned to Paris in 1660
to produce an opera (_Serse_) at the Louvre in honour of the marriage of
Louis XIV. He visited Paris again in 1662, bringing out his _Ercole
Amante_. His death occurred in Venice on the 14th of January 1676.
Twenty-seven operas of Cavalli are still extant, most of them being
preserved in the library of St Mark at Venice. Monteverde had found
opera a musico-literary experiment, and left it a magnificent dramatic
spectacle. Cavalli succeeded in making opera a popular entertainment. He
reduced Monteverde's extravagant orchestra to more practical limits,
introduced melodious arias into his music and popular types into his
_libretti_. His operas have all the characteristic exaggerations and
absurdities of the 17th century, but they have also a remarkably strong
sense of dramatic effect as well as a great musical facility, and a
grotesque humour which was characteristic of Italian grand opera down to
the death of Alessandro Scarlatti.

CAVALLINI, PIETRO (c. 1259-1344), Italian painter, born in Rome, was an
artist of the earliest epoch of the modern Roman school, and was taught
painting and mosaic by Giotto while employed at Rome; it is believed
that he assisted his master in the mosaic of the Navicella or ship of St
Peter, in the porch of the church of that saint. He also studied under
the Cosmati. Lanzi describes him as an adept in both arts, and mentions
with approbation his grand fresco of a Crucifixion at Assisi, still in
tolerable preservation; he was, moreover, versed in architecture and in
sculpture. According to George Vertue, it is highly probable that
Cavallini executed, in 1279, the mosaics and other ornaments of the tomb
of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. He would thus be the
"Petrus Civis Romanus" whose name is inscribed on the shrine; but a
comparison of dates invalidates this surmise. He died in 1344, at the
age of eighty-five, in the odour of sanctity, having in his later years
been a man of eminent piety. He is said to have carved for the Basilica
of San Paolo fuori le Mura, close to Rome, a crucifix which spoke in
1370 to a female saint. Some highly important works by Cavallini in the
church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, have been recently
discovered.

CAVALLO, TIBERIUS (1749-1809), Anglo-Italian electrician and natural
philosopher, was born on the 30th of March 1749 at Naples, where his
father was a physician. In 1771 he came to Engl