According to our authority, there took place in the second half of the fourteenth century an active exchange of the achievements between the Florentines and the Paris school, in which France took from Italy a greater rhythmic variety, while Italy gained from France the manner of writing over a _faux-bourdon_ foundation, the result being a decided detriment to the Florentine school, which lost much of its freedom in the invention of independent voices, though it gained in harmonic purity, while of course the consecutive octaves and fifths naturally disappear entirely. Examples of madrigals, _cacci_, etc., of the Florentine school may be examined in Johannes Wolf’s _Geschichte der Mensuralnotation_. A notable specimen by Giovanni da Cascia is 'The White Peacock,’ quoted by Riemann (I²). The _cantori a liuto_, who flourished probably throughout the fifteenth century, performed, no doubt, the compositions of these masters, no less than their own inventions and the popular songs of the day, the _frottole_, the _canzone_, _villanesche_ and _villanelle_, which resounded through the streets and the _campagna_ of Renaissance Italy.
The fifteenth century saw Italy well advanced toward the state in which it has been compared to ancient Greece. The work begun by Petrarch had made mighty strides, the recovery of ancient learning and ancient art had become the great passion of the age, and the worship of beauty was the second, if not the first, creed of a people but recently emerged from the broils of civil war and settled down to a prosperous period, under a benevolent tyranny of which the rule of the Medici at Florence was the arch-type. Learning and culture had become a badge of nobility and the patronage of the arts an instrument of power. That music shared in the boon which came to art is unquestionable; a musical education was once again, as in ancient Greece, an essential part of a gentleman’s equipment; poets and musicians shared the patronage of princes, who themselves had no greater ambition than to be accounted men of genius--in truth, Florence had become the Athens of the modern world.
Cosimo de Medici returned from his Venetian exile in 1434 and, once installed in power, we see him surrounded by such men as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia. Gemistos Plethos, the Byzantine Greek, fires his passion for Plato’s philosophy and Marsilio Ficino is trained under his patronage to translate the works of the sage. Vespasiano assures us of his versatility as follows: 'When giving audience to a scholar, he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, ... astrologers found him well versed in their science, ... musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he much delighted.’