Although Handel was in art a visualist, and though his music had a highly descriptive and evocatory power, he only made a very restrained use of instrumental tone-colour.[383] However, he showed on occasion a refined intelligence in its use. The two oratorios written at Rome when he found himself in the society of the Cardinal Ottoboni, and his great _virtuoso_ works, _The Triumph of Time_ and _The Resurrection_ of 1708, have a fine and well-varied orchestration.[384] In London he was one of the first to introduce the use of the horn into the orchestra of the opera.[385] "He was the first," says Volbach, "to assert the expressive personality of the violoncello."[386] From the viola he knew how to secure many curious effects of indefinite and disquieting half-tones,[387] he gave to the bassoons a lugubrious and fantastic character,[388] he experimented with new instruments, small[389] and great,[390] he used the drum (_tambour_) solo in a dramatic fashion for Jupiter's oath in _Semele_. For special situations, by instrumental tone-colours, he secures effects not only of dramatic expression, but also of exotism and local colour. It is so in the two scenes from the two Cleopatras, _Giulio Cesare_ (1724)[391] and _Alexander Balus_ (1748). But great painter as Handel was he did not work so much through the brilliancy, variety, and novelty of his tone-colours as by the beauty of his designs, and his effects of light and shade. With a voluntarily restrained palette, and by satisfying himself with the sober colours of the strings, he yet was able to produce surprising and thrilling effects. Volbach has shown[392] that he had less recourse to the contrast and mixing of instruments than to the division of the same family of instruments into different groups. In the introductory piece movement to his second _Esther_ (1732) the violins are divided into five groups;[393] in _The Resurrection_ (1708), into four divisions;[394] the violas are sometimes divided into two, the second being reinforced by the third violin, or by the violoncellos.[395] On the other hand, Handel, when he considered it advisable, reduced his instrumental forces by suppressing the viola and the second violin, whose places were taken by the clavecin. All his orchestral art is in the true instinct of balance and economy, which, with the most restricted means in managing a few colours, yet knows how to obtain as powerful impressions as our musicians of to-day, with their crowded palette.[396] Nothing, then, is more important, if we wish to render this music truly, than the avoidance of upsetting the equilibrium of the various sections of the orchestra under the pretext of enriching it and bringing it up to date. The worse fault is to deprive it, by a useless surplus of tone-colours, of that suppleness and subtlety of nuance which is its principal charm.