The players, apart from the professional performers, were either single amateurs, or whole orchestras of them, organised into a corporate Academy.[885] Many artists in other branches were at home in music, and often masters of the art. People of position were averse to wind-instruments, for the same reason[886] which made them distasteful to Alcibiades and Pallas Athene. In good society singing, either alone or accompanied with the violin, was usual; but quartettes of string-instruments were also common,[887] and the ‘clavicembalo’ was liked on account of its varied effects. In singing the solo only was permitted, ‘for a single voice is heard, enjoyed, and judged far better.’ In other words, as singing, notwithstanding all conventional modesty, is an exhibition of the individual man of society, it is better that each should be seen and heard separately. The tender feelings produced in the fair listeners are taken for granted, and elderly people are therefore recommended to abstain from such forms of art, even though they excel in them. It was held important that the effect of the song should be enhanced by the impression made on the sight. We hear nothing however of the treatment in these circles of musical composition as an independent branch of art. On the other hand it happened sometimes that the subject of the song was some terrible event which had befallen the singer himself.[888] This dilettantism, which pervaded the middle as well as the upper classes, was in Italy both more widely spread and more genuinely artistic than in any other country of Europe. Wherever we meet with a description of social intercourse, there music and singing are always and expressly mentioned. Hundreds of portraits show us men and women, often several together, playing or holding some musical instrument, and the angelic concerts represented in the ecclesiastical pictures prove how familiar the painters were with the living effects of music. We read of the lute-player Antonio Rota, at Padua (d. 1549), who became a rich man by his lessons, and published a handbook to the practice of the lute.[889] At a time when there was no opera to concentrate and monopolise musical talent, this general cultivation of the art must have been something wonderfully varied, intelligent, and original. It is another question how much we should find to satisfy us in these forms of music, could they now be reproduced for us. CHAPTER VI. THE POSITION OF WOMEN.