We have learned in the previous chapters how music, an incipient art fastened in the bondage of religious mysticism, groped through the blackness of the mediæval night; how, bound by dogmatic rule, it became the object of intellectual lucubration, the scholastic medium of pedants, who reared their stupendous structure of Gothic intricacy beyond the reach of ordinary man, 'that tower of Babel, in the building of which tongues were confounded, till no one understood what he sang nor what he heard.’ And we have seen how this edifice, in adapting itself to the use of the denizens, softened its lines and its angles, broadened its spaces and became a thing of beauty--a process in which we see reflected the dawn of a new era, when humanity breathes a freer air; that glorious spiritual awakening which found its religious expression in the Reformation, its æsthetic revelation in the Renaissance. We shall presently consider the influence of the former upon the course of music in Germany; our immediate purpose is to follow the path of the parallel process accomplished through the Renaissance in Italy. In the words of J. Addington Symonds, the history of the Renaissance is 'the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.’ In politics it meant the breaking down of the reactionary forces vested in the church and the empire, in science it meant the substitution of knowledge for superstition, the fearless exploring of new continents and the demonstration of the infinity of the universe; in art it meant the firing of man’s imagination, the stimulation of his creative faculties by the Revival of Learning, 'that rediscovery of the classic past which restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after a spiritual freedom, ... which held up for emulation master works of literature, philosophy and art, provoked inquiry, shattered the narrow mental barrier imposed by mediæval orthodoxy.’