Adroit as were the French mechanics who prepared the abundant spectacular effects of the medieval mysteries, they were surpassed in skill by the Italian engineers of the Renascence, who lent their aid to the superb outdoor festivals wherein the expanding artistic energy of the period was most magnificently displayed. Leonardo da Vinci did not disdain to design machines disclosing a surprising fertility of resource. It was from those outdoor spectacles of the Italians that the French court-ballets are directly descended, and also the English masks, which demanded the collaboration of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. But at first the Italians got along without the aid of the yet unborn scene-painter, and the inventions of the engineer were carried out by the mechanic and the decorator. Even as late as the seventeenth century a magnificent spectacle presented in the garden of the Pitti Palace in Florence relied mainly upon the ingenious engineer and scarcely at all upon the scene-painter. It seems probable that it is here in Italy in the Renascence, and at first as an accompaniment of the outdoor spectacle, or of its indoor rival, that the art of the actual scene-painter had its birth. The engineers required the aid of the artists--indeed, in those days, when there was little specialization of function, the engineers were almost always artists themselves, capable of their own decoration. [Illustration: An outdoor entertainment in the gardens of the Pitti Palace in Florence in the early sixteenth century From a contemporary print] In time there would be necessary specialization, and after a while certain artists came to devote themselves chiefly to scene-painting, finding their immediate opportunity in the decoration of the operas, which then began to multiply. The opera has always been aristocratic, expensive, and spectacular, and it continued the tradition of the highly decorated open-air festivals. In fact, it improved upon this tradition, in so far as that was possible, and it achieved a variety of mechanical effects scarcely less complicated than those which charm our eyes to-day in 'Rheingold' and 'Parsifal.' Thirty years ago the late Charles Nuitter, the archivist of the Paris Opéra and himself a librettist of wide experience, drew my attention to Sabbatini's 'Practica di fabricar scene e machini ne' teatri' (published in 1638), and he assured me that the resources of the Opéra did not go beyond those which were at the command of the Italians three centuries earlier. "They could do then," he asserted, "almost everything that we can do now here at the Opéra. For example, they could bring a ship on the stage under full sail. We have only one superiority over them: we have abundant light now, we have electricity, and they were dependent on candles and lamps."