Let us run through the arrangement of Act III. The curtain rises on the Infernal Regions with scenery painted in the magnificent style of the Italian painters of the period—Titian, Tintoret, Correggio—any of the great masters we may like to think of—and with many ingenious mechanical devices; for these brilliant Italians were very well accustomed to getting up pageants and _festas_. The trombone, cornet and organ play large and sombre chords to evoke the idea of Hades. Orpheus enters and tries to conquer the Powers of Darkness with all the resources of his art. The first couplet of his song is accompanied by the _organo di legno_ (organ with the flute tones) and the _chitaroni_; and when Orpheus begins to sing, the two violins play. At the second couplet, after a _ritournella_ by the violins, two cornets take their places and play; and at the third couplet, when Orpheus sings “Where Eurydice is, is paradise for me,” the double harp plays graceful arpeggios. Then Orpheus sings some very elaborate vocalizations accompanied by two violins and a _basso da braccio_ (a deep violin). When Orpheus bids Charon, the ferryman, let him pass over the river Styx, the string-quartet plays chords; and, finally, when Orpheus is triumphant, the whole Orchestra bursts forth in one grand _finale_. _Orfeo_ was a truly wonderful work. It was startling in many ways; but its _Orchestra was conservative_. The instruments played together in families. There was no attempt to mingle all their voices together, nor to combine instruments except at the very end when the curtain was falling. It is not _Orfeo_, therefore, that marks the beginning of our modern Orchestra, but an opera that Monteverde brought out twenty years later called _Il Combattimento di Tancrede e Clorinda_. In the _Combat of Tancred and Clorinda_, to give the opera its English name, Monteverde used a very different Orchestra from the one he had used in _Orfeo_. Here he has two violins, two viols (tenor and bass) and the _contrabasso da gamba_. At this very moment—the year 1627—_the violin took root in the Orchestra_. In ten years’ time it became the leading instrument.[38] By 1639 _there were no more players on the viol in Italy_ that amounted to anything. From 1634 the violoncello was also established as an orchestral instrument. Truly, a great change had taken place! Monteverde’s Orchestra—we can now call it so—had become one in which the violins and the instruments of the piano class—the clavecin, etc.—form the _new body of the Orchestra_. When Monteverde wanted certain effects, he now used special _timbres_, or kinds of voices: trumpets and drums for triumphal scenes; cornets and trombones for fantastic scenes; and flutes for pastoral scenes. Such was the Orchestra that Monteverde used in his celebrated opera, the _Incoronazione di Poppea_, which he brought out in 1642, at the end of his life, and which the _Orchestras of Venice followed for years_.