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Rh to the north, a branch line runs to Cremona. By road Piacenza is 88 m. north-east of Genoa. The town has an arsenal, a technical and arts school, and various industries—iron and brass works, foundries, silk-throwing, printing works and flour mills.

Piacenza was made a Roman colony in 218 While its walls were yet unfinished it had to repulse an attack by the Gauls, and in the latter part of 218 it afforded protection to the remains of the Roman army under Scipio which had been defeated in the great battle on the Trebia. In 205 it withstood a protracted siege by Hasdrubal. Five years later the Gauls burned the city; and in 190 it had to be recruited with three thousand families. In 187 it was connected with Ariminum and the south by the construction of the Via Aemilia. Later on it became a very important road centre; the continuation northwards of the Via Aemilia towards Milan, with a branch to Ticinum, crossed the Po there, and the Via Postumia from Cremona to Dertona and Genoa passed through it. Later still Augustus reconstructed the road from Dertona to Vade, and into Gallia Narbonensis, and gave it the name of Tulia Augusta from Placentia onwards. The rectangular arrangement of the streets in the centre of the town, through which passes the Via Aemilia, is no doubt a survival from Roman times. Placentia is mentioned in connexion with its capture by Cinna and a defeat of the forces of Carbo in the neighbourhood (82 ), a mutiny of Julius Caesar's garrison (50 ), another mutiny under Augustus (40 ), the defence of the city by Spurinna, Otho's general, against Caecina, Vitellius's general ( 69), and the defeat of Aurehan by the Marcomanni outside the walls ( 271). In 546 Totila reduced Piacenza by famine. Between 997 and 1035 the city was governed by its bishops, who had received the title of count from Otho III. At Roncaglia, 5 m. to the east, the emperor Conrad II. held the diet which passed the Salic law. In the latter part of the 12th century it was one of the leading members of the Lombard League. For the most part it remained Guelph, though at times, as when it called in Galeazzo Visconti, it was glad to appeal to a powerful Ghibelline for aid against its domestic tyrants. In 1447 the city was captured and sacked by Francesco Sforza. Having been occupied by the papal forces in 1512, it was in 1545 united with (q.v.) to form an hereditary duchy for Pierluigi Farnese, son of Paul III. In 1746 a battle between the Franco-Spanish forces and the Austrians was fought under the city walls, and in 1796 it was occupied by the French. In 1848 Piacenza was the first of the towns of Lombardy to join Piedmont; but it was reoccupied by the Austrians till 1859.

PIANOFORTE (Ital. piano, soft, and forte, loud). The group of keyed stringed musical instruments, among which the pianoforte is latest in order of time, has been invented and step by step developed with the modern art of music, which is based upon the simultaneous employment of different musical sounds. In the 10th century the “organum” arose, an elementary system of accompaniment to the voice, consisting of fourths and octaves below the melody and moving with it; and the (q.v.), the earliest keyed instrument, was, in the first instance, the rude embodiment of this idea and convenient means for its expression. There was as yet no keyboard of balanced key levers; sliders were drawn out like modern draw-stops, to admit the compressed air necessary to make the pipes sound. About the same time arose a large stringed instrument, the organistrum, the parent of the now obsolete hurdy-gurdy; as the organ needed a blower as well as an organist, so the player of the organistrum required a handle-turner, by whose aid the three strings of the instrument were made to sound simultaneously upon a wheel, and, according to the well-known sculptured relief of St George de Boscherville, one string was manipulated by means of a row of stoppers or tangents pressed inwards to produce the notes. The other strings were drones, analogous to the drones of the bagpipes, but originally the three strings followed the changing organum.

In the 11th century, the epoch of Guido d'Arezzo, to whom the beginning of musical notation is attributed, the Pythagorean mono chord, with 1ts shifting bridge, was used in the singing schools to teach the intervals of the plain-song of the church. The practical necessity, not merely of demonstrating the proportionate relations of the intervals, but also of initiating pupils into the different gradations of the church tones, had soon after Guido's time brought into use quadruples-fashioned mono chords, which were constructed with scales, analogous to the modern practice with thermometers which are made to show both Réaumur and Centigrade, so that four lines indicated as many authentic and as many plagal tones. This arrangement found great acceptance, for Aribo, writing about fifty years after Guido, says that few mono chords were to be found without it. Had the clavichord then been known, this makeshift contrivance would not have been used. Aribo strenuously endeavoured to improve it, and “by the grace of God ” invented a monochord measure which, on account of the rapidity of the leaps he could make with it, he named a wild-goat (caprea). Jean de Muris (Musica speculativa, 1323) teaches how true relations may be found by a single string monochord, but recommends a four-stringed one, properly a tetrachord, to gain a knowledge of unfamiliar intervals. He describes the musical instruments known in his time, but does not mention the clavichord or monochord with keys, which could not have been then invented. Perhaps one of the earliest forms of such an instrument, in which stoppers or tangents had been adopted from the organist rum, is shown in fig. 1, from a wood carving of a vicar choral or organist, preserved in St Mary's church, Shrewsbury. The latest date to which this interesting figure may be attributed is 1460, but the conventional representation shows that the instrument was then already of a past fashion, although perhaps still retained in use and familiar to the carver. In the Weimar Wunderbuch a MS. dated 1440, with pen and ink miniatures, is given a “clavichordium” having 8 short and apparently 16 long keys, the artist has drawn 12 strings in a rectangular case, but no tangents are visible. A keyboard of balanced keys existed in the little portable organ known as the regal, so often represented in old carvings, paintings and stained windows. Vitruvius, De architectura, lib. x. cap. xi., translated by Newton, describes a balanced keyboard; but the key apparatus is more particularly shown in The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria, translated by Bennet Woodcroft (London, 1851). In confirmation of this has been the remarkable recovery at Carthage of a terra-cotta model of a Hydraulikon or water organ, dating from the 2nd century, in which a balanced keyboard of 18 or 19 keys is shown. It seems likely the balanced keyboard was lost, and afterwards reinvented. The name of