of Night and Dawn were made the subjects of a series of glittering
scenes enveloping a plan much like that of some modern ballet spectacle.

Throughout the sixteenth century, as we have seen, these court
representations grew in complexity of pictorial detail, while the
importance of the development of a medium for individual expression sank
further and further out of notice. One reads of occasional uses of the
old method of solo recitation to the lyre, but never as a controlling
motive in the dramatic construction. It appears only as an incident in
the general medley of sensuous allurements. So, too, the convocation of
masses of singers, dancers and instrumentalists seems to have been
nothing more than a natural demonstration of that growing appetite for
luxury which characterized the approach of the feeble intellectual era
of the Seicentisti, that era in which "ecclesiastical intolerance had
rendered Italy nearly destitute of great men."

These quoted words are Symonds's; let him speak still further: "Bruno
burned, Vanini burned, Carnescchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio
burned; Campanella banished after a quarter of a century's imprisonment
with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered
over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at
length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Scarpi survived the stylus of the
Roman curia with calm inscrutability at St. Fosca; Galileo meditated
with closed lips in his watch tower behind Bello Squardo. With Michael
Angelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the godlike
lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the
sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's prestige, to
carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor one. Marino,
Tassoni, the younger Buonarotti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature.
The Bolognese academy in painting. After these men expand arid
wildernesses of the Sei Cento--barocco architecture, false taste,
frivolity, grimace, affectation--Jesuitry translated into false
culture."

Symonds is here speaking of the dawn of the seventeenth century, but the
movement toward these conditions is quite clearly marked in the later
years of the preceding cycle. Its influence on the lyric drama is
manifest in the multiplication of luxurious accessories and superficial
splendors, designed to appeal to the taste of nobles plunged in sensuous
extravagances and easily mistaking del