This demand was powerfully backed by the introduction of printing in 1444. This introduction resulted in lowering the price of books, and a plentiful supply of cheap reading attracted readers. Hence the mass of the Roman Catholic laity became readers as well as listeners. The whole system of worship had been based on the existence of a non-reading public. But now the age of popular inquiry began, and it became necessary for church music to abandon its complexity and address itself to meet the demands of awakening intelligence. The dawn of the Renaissance in art was caused by the revival of Greek learning, which reintroduced Greek models. The enormous effect of a new contemplation by the Italian mind of Doric architecture and Greek sculpture can hardly be comprehended by us to whom these things are so familiar. The force and beauty of simplicity were brought home to the people by the very examples which awoke in them a desire for imaginative life and personal expression. The Renaissance led to a clearer, stronger, more eloquent style in all art, and in time it was bound to make itself felt in music. The fact that Leonardo da Vinci worked before Josquin des Prés proves nothing except that music was behind the other arts in the development of her technic, and had to work out her own laws of existence before she could feel the influence of reformatory thought. The popular music of the time naturally appealed to composers as their feeling for distinctly outlined form increased, and this feeling was directly influenced by the artistic teachings of the Renaissance. As art remodelled itself on Greek patterns, and architecture found in the Doric lines a relief to the endless details of the Gothic, so music inclined toward the simple contours of the song-forms. The elementary attraction of pure rhythm grew in potency as composers realized more clearly that it was one of the fundamental components of music; and with a recognition of this fact came that of the deeper significance of chord harmony. The folk-song itself had always clung to the major and minor scales, and had not often employed the purely ecclesiastical modes. The mode known as the Ionic--the old Greek Lydian mode, condemned by the ancients as lascivious--was nothing more nor less than our major scale of G, and as such the church composers knew it. Its possibilities made themselves more and more clear as the artistic musicians of the day studied the popular tunes, and so in time it came to its true seat of honor in music.