Italian opera "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri was the earliest composition considered opera, as understood today. Peri's works, however, did not arise out of a creative vacuum in the area of sung drama. An underlying prerequisite for the creation of opera proper was the practice of monody. Monody is the solo singing/setting of a dramatically conceived melody, designed to express the emotional content of the text it carries, which is accompanied by a relatively simple sequence of chords rather than other polyphonic parts. Italian composers began composing in this style late in the 16th century, and it grew in part from the long-standing
Jacopo da Empoli Battista Brazzè ("Il Bigio"), Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Virgilio Zaballi. Finally, working in a thematic often shunned by Florentine painters, after the 1620s he completed a series of exceptional still-life paintings . Jacopo da Empoli Jacopo da Empoli (30 April 1551 – 30 September 1640) was an Italian Florentine Reformist painter. Born in Florence as Jacopo Chimenti (Empoli being the birthplace of his father), he worked mostly in his native city. He apprenticed under Maso da San Friano. Like his contemporary in Counter-Maniera (Counter-Mannerism), Santi di Tito, he moved into a style often more crisp, less contorted, and less crowded