Centuries were necessary before the writing of music became exact, but, slowly, laws were elaborated.
Thanks to them the works of the Sixteenth Century came into being, in all their admirable purity and learned polyphony.

Hard and inflexible laws engendered an art analogous to primitive painting.

Melody was almost entirely absent and was relegated to dance tunes and popular songs.

But the dance tunes of the time, on which, perhaps, erudition was not used sufficiently, were written in the same polyphonic style and with the same rigid correctness as the madrigals and the church music.
We know that the popular songs found their way into the church music and that Palestrina's great reform consisted in banishing them.

However, we should get but a feeble idea of the part they played, if we imagined that they naturally belonged there.