Lorenzo’s famous academy constituted perhaps the greatest intellectual galaxy of the age, for at his table sat Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Luigi Pulci. Surrounded by these companions we behold him in the streets of Florence, not disdaining to perform his own songs, in the midst of an approving populace, or, perchance, 'when Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno and the large Italian stars come forth above,’ accompanied by a few kindred spirits, lute in hand, singing the verses of a Dante or a Petrarch to the accompaniment of soft Italian zephyrs; or, again, in his villa 'on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole,’ with Michael Angelo, 'seated between Ficino and Politian, with the voices of prophets vibrating in his memory and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears ... till Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo’s last-made _ballata_.’[105] To such gatherings of boon companions and to the small domestic circle the _cantori a liuto_ were finally relegated, for, as we shall see, their usefulness had been outlived. Such men as these were the perpetuators of their art and the last, perhaps, to cultivate the spontaneous monodies of their Florentine forbears, for it is unthinkable that these worshippers of beauty, these æsthetic sentimentalists should have escaped the charm of that school and have forgone it in favor of that which followed. For meantime the musicians of the Netherland school continued to spread their propaganda in Italy, and so successfully, that their contrapuntal works began to supersede the native monodic style. [Illustration: ALTAR OF THE VIRGIN.] _After the painting by Bellini (Venice Academy)._ Their method had, indeed, undergone great improvement: Josquin des Près and his more expressive style had achieved tremendous popularity throughout Europe.[106] Toward the end of the fifteenth century these masters cultivated the secular forms more and more, always, of course, in their wonted contrapuntal method. They would frequently take the melody of a favorite folk-song, use it as their tenor (the middle part) around which they wove an artful counterpoint. In Germany the 'harmonization’ of popular melodies, or melodies in the popular vein, had been going forward for some time, and it is a noteworthy fact that Heinrich Isaac, one of those most prominently engaged in this work, was organist in Florence from 1484 to 1494 and again after 1514. The style of writing adopted in these popular settings was a simple 'note against note,’ which emphasized chord progressions rather than melodic integrity.