Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral _is_ music and the castle _makes_ music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal” rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on which even the 18th Century was still drawing. The same contrast reveals itself, artistically, in the _class_-opposition of Renaissance and Reformation.[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay (c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great Netherlanders ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) and his school and Josquin des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to the height of fulfilment. The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human voice comes to an end in the _a cappella_ style of Palestrina and Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus of instruments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal, that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal Form to the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy produces the _basso continuo_ which requires virtuosi and not pious participants.