Of Alessandro Striggio and his art work at the court of Mantua and elsewhere special mention will be made in another part of this work. Moreover it is not necessary that anything should be said here of the epoch-making creations of Claudio Monteverde, who was long in the Gonzaga service and who produced his "Orfeo" at Mantua. Sufficient has been set forth in this chapter to give some estimate of the importance and activity of Mantua as a literary and musical center. The culture of the age was confined almost exclusively to churchmen, professors, literary laborers and the nobility. The long line of musical and dramatic development followed at Mantua had no relation to the general art life of the Italian people. But its importance in its preparation for the birth of the art form finally known as opera is not easily overestimated, especially when we remember that this form did not become a public entertainment till 1637. It was at Mantua that Angelo Poliziano's "Orfeo," the first lyric drama with a secular subject, was produced, and it must be our next business to examine this work and set forth the conditions under which it was made known. CHAPTER IV The Artistic Impulse The non-existence of the drama in the Middle Ages is one of the strikingly significant deficiencies of the period. The illiterate condition of the people, and even of the nobility, the fragmentary state of governments, the centralizing of small and dependent communities around the feet of petty tyrants, the frequency of wars large and small, and the devotion of men to skill in the use of arms, made it impossible that attention should be bestowed upon so polite and sedentary a form of amusement as the drama. It is generally held that the church made the first movement toward the abolition of the drama by placing its ban on the plays handed down from the Greeks and the Romans, partly because of their inculcation of reverence for heathen deities and partly because of the shameless indecencies which had invaded them. But this could have been only one of many causes which operated in keeping the play out of Europe for so many centuries. When it was revived, as we have seen, in the form of the liturgical drama and afterward of the sacred representation, it bore little or no resemblance to the splendid art product bequeathed to the world by the Greeks. The sudden and glorious return of the dramatic subjects of the Greeks to the stage of medieval Europe marks the beginning of the modern era. When the Italians turned to the stories of ancient fable for material for their secular drama they were without doubt quite unconscious of the importance of the step they were taking. It is only the reflective eye of retrospective study that can discern all the significant elements happily combined in this event by the overmastering laws of human progress.