Here, then, we may permit the entire matter to rest. It ought now to be manifest that in their experiments at the resuscitation of the Greek manner of declamation the ardent young Florentines were impelled first of all by the feeling that the obliteration of the text by musical device was a crying evil and that by it dramatic expression was rendered impossible. Doubtless they felt that their art lacked a medium for the publication of the individual, but it is by no means likely that they realized the full significance of this deficiency or of their own efforts to supply it. Nevertheless, what they did under the incentive of a genuine artistic impulse was in direct line with the whole intellectual progress of the Renaissance. The thing that was patent to them was the importance of studying the models of antiquity to find out how dramatic delineation was to be accomplished; but in doing so they discovered the one element which had been wanting in the Italian lyric drama since its birth in the Mantuan court, namely, the way to set speeches for one actor to music having communicative potency and capable of preserving the intelligibility of the text. So they completed a cycle of the art of dramatic music, and, having found the link that was missing in the musical chain of Poliziano's "Orfeo," reincarnated Italy's Arcadian prophet, and built the gates through which Monteverde ushered lyric composition to the broad highway of modern opera. INDEX Agility, vocal, 214 Alemannia, Rudolfo de, 41 Alessandro, Gian Andrea di, 46 Ambros, August Wilhelm, 107 "Amfiparnaso," 191 et seq. "Apollo and the Python," spectacular intermezzo, 174 Arcadia, the Italian, 62 et seq. Archilei, Vittoria, 216, 218 Argyropoulos, John, 69 "Arion," spectacular intermezzo, 175 Ariosto, performance of his "Suppositi," 90, 136 Ballata, 76, 116, 144 "Ballet Comique de la Reine," 178 Banchieri, Adriano, 198 Banquets, music at, 139 Basso continuo, 232 Bati, Luca, 30 Beccari, 170 Bembo, Pietro, 61 Boccaccio, 59 Botta, Bergonzo, festal play by, 161 Busnois, Antoine, 115