Yet some of the very composers who devoted their time to the solution, or construction, of such futile puzzles were themselves pioneers of what we can call modern, as opposed to mediaeval, music. With Josquin the Renaissance in music may be said to begin. His sense of harmony might be compared with the dawning sense of perspective in painting. The true history of the part played by music during the Renaissance has yet to be written. Here only a few salient points can be touched upon. The invention of printing brought music within the reach of a far wider circle. The cultivated amateur comes more and more into notice. The leaders of music in the earlier period were still the Netherlanders. They overran Italy and came into contact with Italian poets. The offspring of this union was the madrigal. The output of secular music from the presses of Italy was enormous, and it was soon imitated in other countries. Music was still to a large extent under the patronage of princes, but instead of being a rare luxury for the enhancement of courtly splendour it became a universal ornament and pleasure of all cultured society. This is especially observable in Elizabethan England. What is important to realize about the secular music of the sixteenth century is that music was no longer the monopoly of a close corporation of professional musicians in which the distinction between composer and performer was very indefinite; it was written very largely with full consciousness of the enjoyment which ordinary people could derive from the actual practice of it. As music becomes more and more one of the normal delights of cultured life, it becomes less and less of a mystery and more of a conscious art. Josquin and his school had laid the firm foundations of the classical language of music. If we take a long view of the history of the art from ancient times to the present day, concentrating our attention mainly on secular music, which obviously expresses the genuine musical feelings of mankind, rather than on church music, which in spite of the natural impulse of composers has always been subject to anti-artistic restrictions of style, we shall be convinced that the revolution associated with the name of Monteverdi and the beginnings of opera was a small matter compared with the establishment of the harmonic system a century and a half earlier.