Giovanni Battista Bassani, a Venetian composer, was a pupil of Castrovillari for the Violin, and became celebrated for the excellent style of his instrumental music. Among many other compositions of various styles, there is a set of his sonatas “da camera” for Violin and Bass, published in 1679, and thirteen sonatas for two Violins and Bass, excellent of their kind, and which fixed the style of music for bow instruments at the period at which they appeared. Bassani had the honour of being the master of Corelli, the great artist, possessed of immense talent, who by the elevation of his ideas, and the perfection of his style, placed himself at the head of the Violin School, and hastened the progress of the art considerably. Arcangelo Corelli, a name justly celebrated in the annals of music, will descend to ages unborn without losing a particle of its glory, whatever revolutions may be effected in the domains of art. The great artist who bore that name, no less celebrated for his compositions than for his marvellous execution at that period, was born in 1653, at Fusignano, a small town in the States of the Church, and died at Rome, on the 18th of January, 1713. His contemporaries were not jealous of his glory, for the whole of Europe welcomed his talent with unanimous acclamations; his countrymen deposited his remains in the Pantheon, and erected a monument to him close to that of Raphael. At the expiration of a century and a half, Corelli is still considered as the primitive type of the best Violin schools; and although the art has been enriched by many effects unknown in his day; although its mechanism has attained a high degree of perfection, the study of his works is still one of the best for the acquirement of a broad and majestic style. His fifth work, composed of twelve sonatas for the Violin, with the continued Bass for the Harpsichord, printed at Rome in 1700, is a masterpiece of its kind.