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one. But the Reformers insisted that religion had to be popular, which meant it should be presented in the vernacular—itself a Renaissance notion—and that meant all the old settings in Latin had to be discarded. Moreover, the more rigorous Reformers insisted, rather on the lines of John XXII, that complexity of setting was inadmissible, and in particular that no more than one note should be sung on each syllable, or even each word, so that congregations could follow the text. Rejecting the mass, with its complex settings, they favored church music that was simple and biblical, such as psalmody, producing straightforward metrical settings of the psalms that could be roared out by vast congregations (e.g., at the services held at the cross outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London). The Reformers, led by Luther himself, also wrote vernacular hymns, with a strong biblical content, set to nonpolyphonic music.

Such developments, as well as the general use of the vernacular in church services, proved popular, especially in the towns, where more and more citizens were becoming literate and read the Bible for themselves. By the 1540s, the Catholic Church was not only losing northern Germany, much of France, England, Scotland and Scandinavia, but was finding itself on the cultural defensive everywhere. It reacted in a number of different ways, which were often inconsistent. First, it increased the activities of the Inquisition, especially in Spain (where it was run essentially by the state) and in Italy (where it was run by the papacy). Second, it created new orders, such as the Jesuits, whose chief thrust was in education at all levels. Third, it became more puritanical. The papacy in particular ceased to patronize artists who favored mythology and the nude, and covered up the private parts of male statues. Fourth, it began to reform itself. This took many forms, but the most important were the proper training of priests, the creation of seminaries and colleges, and the activities of key members of the episcopate, such as the great St. Charles Borromeo, the cardinal-archbishop of Milan. Reform took on an institutional aspect when the Council of Trent was summoned in 1545. It sat for most of two decades, with intermissions, and only in its concluding stages did it turn directly to cultural matters.

By this point, the Catholic Church had been identified with the “old” music, that is, any music with Latin texts and polyphonic content. Most professional musicians, even in predominantly Protestant societies, were Catholics; their livelihood was at stake. Queen Elizabeth of England, though Protestant, had an all-Catholic Chapel Royal, which was the target of attack by the advanced Reformers, particularly those with Puritan leanings. By protecting the Catholic performers and composers, she saved English music. But polyphony, and everything associated with it, was under attack within the Catholic Church, even in Rome itself. In 1549, one Italian bishop, Cirillo Franco, said of polyphonic masses: “When one voice says Sanctus, another says Sabbaoth, so that they sound more like cats in January than flowers in May.” Ten years before, Giovanni Morone, bishop of Modena, had actually abolished polyphony in his own cathedral in favor of plainchant, and he was one of the papal legates supervising the discussion of church music when the Council of Trent finally got around to it in 1562–63. There is a famous story, or legend, that the master of music at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the composer Giovanni Palestrina (1525–94), produced his Missa Papae Marcelli, for a special performance, to show that polyphony could be combined with intelligibility, and that this had the desired effect. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Trent ended without any destructive ruling on music.

It was a different matter with painting. Here the council in its final session ruled that stories about sacred personages that were not to be found in the canonical texts, and saintly miracles that the church had not certified as probable, were not to figure in