The popularity of an exaggerated vibrato among many (but by no means all) Mediterranean tenors and singing teachers of this era has been traced back by musicologists to the influential example set by the early-19th-century virtuoso vocalist Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854). Rubini had employed it with great success as an affecting device in the new Romantic operas of Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. A host of young Italian tenors—including the renowned Giovanni Matteo Mario (1810–1883) — copied Rubini's trend-setting innovation in order to heighten the emotional impact of the music that they were singing, and to facilitate the delivery of fioritura "by, as it were, running up and down the vibrato" (to quote Scott; see p. 126).