The fifteenth century saw Italy well advanced toward the state in which it has been compared to ancient Greece. The work begun by Petrarch had made mighty strides, the recovery of ancient learning and ancient art had become the great passion of the age, and the worship of beauty was the second, if not the first, creed of a people but recently emerged from the broils of civil war and settled down to a prosperous period, under a benevolent tyranny of which the rule of the Medici at Florence was the arch-type. Learning and culture had become a badge of nobility and the patronage of the arts an instrument of power. That music shared in the boon which came to art is unquestionable; a musical education was once again, as in ancient Greece, an essential part of a gentleman’s equipment; poets and musicians shared the patronage of princes, who themselves had no greater ambition than to be accounted men of genius--in truth, Florence had become the Athens of the modern world. Cosimo de Medici returned from his Venetian exile in 1434 and, once installed in power, we see him surrounded by such men as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia. Gemistos Plethos, the Byzantine Greek, fires his passion for Plato’s philosophy and Marsilio Ficino is trained under his patronage to translate the works of the sage. Vespasiano assures us of his versatility as follows: 'When giving audience to a scholar, he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, ... astrologers found him well versed in their science, ... musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he much delighted.’ Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), far surpassed his grandsire in talent and culture. He was a writer of prose and poetry, gave the impulse to the revival of a national literature, and may be said to have raised popular poetry to the dignity of an art, in writing new verses for the _canzone a ballo_ which the young men and girls sang and danced upon the squares of Florence to celebrate the return of May, and the _canti carnascialeschi_, the songs that the Florentine populace sang, masked, at carnival times. He organized for these occasions great pageants in which he himself took part, engaging the best artists for the embellishment of chariots and the designing of costumes, while he himself wrote songs appropriate to the characters represented on the cars, causing new musical settings to be made by eminent composers. 'Every festivity,’ says Symonds, 'May morning tournaments, summer evening dances on the squares of Florence, weddings, carnival processions, and vintage banquets at the villa, had their own lyrics with music and the _Carola_.’