n and made Italy his home, presents a great contrast to the
state of the art in Germany and the Netherlands about the same period.
The love of music in these countries had been growing among the
people from the days of their minstrel poets and their wandering
musicians. In Italy minstrelsy received but little attention or
encouragement. The effect of this was probably felt when that
extraordinary love of culture and admiration for art manifested itself
amid the courts of her princes, about the middle of the fifteenth
century. The love of melody then, as now, was deeply rooted in the
nature of her people. Musical composition, however, of a high order,
and able executants, were to be found elsewhere, and in Flanders in
particular, and there the principal music and musicians were sought by
the Italian _dilettanti_. To this fortuitous combination of melody and
musical learning we owe the greatest achievements in the art of music.
Upon it was raised the work of Palestrina, Scarlatti, and Corelli,
which their distinguished followers utilised with such judgment and
effect. The progress and development of the Madrigal in Italy may be
said to have been co-equal with that of the Viol, for which its music
served, and to which the Italians gave the same beauty of form and
exquisite refinement. The ingenuity and skilfulness of the early
German Viol makers was not less speedily recognised by the Italians
than was the learning and power manifested by the Flemish motet
writers. The work of the Italians with regard to both the Madrigal and
the Viol was artistic in the highest degree, and such as could alone
have been accomplished by men nourished on the teachings of the
Renaissance, and surrounded by its chief glories.

There is evidence of German influence over the Italian Viol
manufacture at the end of the fifteenth century, in the
German-sounding names of makers located in Italy, and likewise in the
character and construction of the oldest Italian Viols: notably, there
is the crescent-shaped sound-hole common to the German Grosse-Geige
and Klein-Geige. The most ancient Viols in existence are those by
Hieronymus Brensius of Bologna, two of which are in the Museum of the
Academy of Music at Bologna, and a third is in my possession. They
have labels printed in Roman letters, and doubtless belong to the end
of the fifteenth century. These instruments serve to illustrate the
condition of the art of Viol-making in Italy at that period. The