Two types of secular vocal music were cultivated in Spain during the sixteenth century: unaccompanied polyphonic songs and solo songs with instrumental accompaniment. The compositions for unaccompanied voices have been preserved principally in musical anthologies, the Cancioneros. Many remain anonymous, but recent investigations have disclosed new names and made possible new and more complete attributions. A number of the composers were chiefly celebrated for their religious works. Usually they were attached to the Royal Chapels in the Peninsula itself or in the Kingdom of Naples. Later in the century Spanish composers lived much abroad holding posts at various Italian courts or at the Imperial Court in Vienna. The great trio, Morales, Guerrero, Victoria wrote little or no secular music.

A considerable literature of solo songs with instrumental accompaniment has been preserved in the very numerous collections of music for the vihuela. This instrument, shaped very like the guitar, with narrow waist and flat back, was designed, however, for the performance of complicated contrapuntal music such as was played more generally at that time on the lute.

The weakest spot in the attempt to define, describe, and understand the Renaissance is our failure to consider causes. This failure is largely due to a failure of definition in time. The beginning has been placed anywhere between the Sixteenth and the Fourteenth Centuries. Most of the causes which have been suggested (the fall of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America) are Fifteenth Century phenomena. But it is generally agreed that humanism began with Petrarch. I think we must ask ourselves why the Latin classics, which had been lying about in neglected corners of libraries, should suddenly become the most valuable things in the world. It is not enough to attribute this new enthusiasm to “fashion.” Men turn eagerly to new ideas chiefly when they are dissatisfied with the old; and there were good reasons for dissatisfaction in Italy in Petrarch's day.

Italian architecture of the sixteenth century is a field where our knowledge has outdistanced our concepts. We are in firm possession of many facts, but we cannot agree as to how they should be interpreted. What is called for is a fresh conceptual framework into which the facts can be fitted. Such a framework cannot be derived from a simple contrast of the Renaissance and the Baroque, nor can it be made to depend on a single catch-all title like Mannerism. It must have three principle characteristics. It must be based on an aesthetic analysis of the monuments. It must include all the principle groups of buildings. Finally it must bear some reasonable relationship to the general view one holds of Italian sixteenth century history as a whole.