The sonnets of Petrarch were set to music and sung; they had indeed been composed for that purpose. Teodoro Riccio furnished an accompaniment to the famous romance, _Italia mia_, and Ciprian van Rore one to the sonnet, _Fontana di dolore, Albergo d’ira_. Ronsard, too, wrote his sonorous rhymes for music; Baïf, as is well known, went so far as to propose to turn writing into a sort of notation, and when his academy was instituted, composers of music and even mere singers were admitted on equal footing with poets. The art of music consisted in giving to thought all the external beauty of which it was capable. Philosophers counted metrical music (in other words, poetry) or vocal music as a part of philosophy. The art thus intellectualised became quite a religion. In his painting of Parnassus at the Vatican, Raphael shows us Apollo singing like an ancient bard. In all the pictures of Paradise that we have seen we have never found a palette, or a sculptor’s point, or even a rostrum or an inkstand; nothing but direct and pure communion with God through contemplation and music. And what could be more delicious than the little choirs of angels which Giovanni Bellini’s imagination placed at the feet of his Madonnas, like an incense of homage from the world! Melozzo gives a queen an organ as her emblem,[238] and Titian one to his Venuses. Music would seem to have been the very breath of happiness. The common people themselves were strangely enamoured of intellectual harmonies. In Italy a number of poets spent their life in the market-places, like Homer. Aurelio Brandiolini, for example, who sang in the squares of Verona the praises of antique heroes, went on, stimulated by popular applause, to execute veritable _tours de force_, such as singing in verse the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s _Natural History_. The celebrated Bernardo Accolti wandered from town to town giving recitals in the principal squares. The moment he arrived, people flocked about him, business was suspended, far-distant shops were shut, lights began to appear on the balconies, and the police hastened up to keep order. Making way through the crowd by favour, the notables formed up round the poet as a guard of honour; and then, under the lamp of some sleeping Madonna, amid breathless silence, the poet’s voice arose towards the starry sky, singing love to the accompaniment of a guitar.