The style of his sacred music varies from simple homophony, designed for absolute clarity of textual expression in conformance with the dictates of the Council of Trent (as Mantua was a center of the Counter-Reformation, this was to be expected), to motet settings similar in expressive intensity to his madrigals including passages of surprising chromaticism not unlike that of Gesualdo. This is particularly true in the 1581 collections: "Ascendente Jesu", for example, contains colorful examples of text-painting such as he used in the works he was composing for the Ferrarese court at the time.