This form, however, would certainly have perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.
There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence, which deserves some detailed mention.

A private academy of amateurs and artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical declamation of the Greeks.

As the new ecclesiastical style created by Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the Classical Revival.

The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces.

It was now, much later in the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt.