intent only on the letters. The MS. has received corrections or small supplements from at least two different persons. One of them (Kenyon’s A2) was contemporary, or nearly so, with the scribe. The other (A3) was considerably later; he wrote a Roman cursive which might belong to the end of the 1st century A.D., or to the early part of the 2nd. The correctors seem to be generally trustworthy; though, like the scribe, they were inattentive to metre, passing over many metrical faults which could easily have been removed. They appear to have compared their MS. with another, or others; but they sometimes made a bad use of such aid, intruding a false reading where their text had the true one.
Breathings are generally added, especially rough breathings; the form is usually square, but sometimes partially rounded. Accents are added, not to all words, but only, as a rule, to those which might cause doubt or difficulty to the reader. This was the Alexandrian practice, accents being regarded as aids to correct reading, and more liberally used when the dialect was not Attic. In accordance with the older system, the accent is not written on the last syllable of a word; when the accent falls there, a grave accent is written on the preceding syllable, or on two such syllables (e.g. βλὴχρας, πὰυθὰλης).
As Kenyon observes, no MS. of equal antiquity is so well supplied with accents. The MS. which comes nearest to it in this respect is the Alcman fragment in the Louvre, which is of similar or slightly higher age, belonging perhaps to the early part of the 1st century A.D.; and in that MS. the comparatively frequent accents were doubtless designed to aid readers unfamiliar with Alcman’s Laconian Doric. With regard to other grammatical or metrical signs (προσῳδίαι) used in the Bacchylides MS., there is not much that calls for special remark. The punctuation, whether by the scribe or by correctors, is very sparse, and certainly cannot always be regarded as authoritative. The signs denoting the end of a strophe or antistrophe (paragraphus), of an epode (coronis), or of an ode (asterisk), are often omitted by the scribe, and, when employed, are sometimes placed incorrectly, or employed in an irregular manner.
Editions.—F. G. Kenyon, Ed. princeps (1897); F. Blass, 3rd ed. (1904); H. Jurenka (1898); N. Festa, text, translation and notes (1898). [The latest edition is by Sir Richard Jebb (1905), with introduction, notes, translation, and bibliography; text only (1906). See also T. Zanghieri, Studi su Bacchilide, Bibliografia Bacchilidea, 1897–1905 (1905)]. (R. C. J.)
BACCIO D'AGNOLO (c. 1460–1543), Florentine wood-carver, sculptor and architect, had the family name of Baglioni, but was always known by the abbreviation of Bartolommeo into Baccio and the use of d’Agnolo as meaning the son of Angelo, his father’s name. He started as a wood-carver, and between 1491 and 1502 did much of the decorative carving in the church of Santa Maria Novella and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Having made his reputation as a sculptor he appears to have turned his attention to architecture, and to have studied at Rome, though at what precise date is uncertain; but quite at the beginning of the 16th century he was engaged with Simon Pollajuolo in restoring the Palazzo Vecchio, and in 1506 he was commissioned to complete the drum of the cupola of the metropolitan church of Santa Maria del Fiore. The latter work, however, was interrupted on account of adverse criticisms from Michelangelo, and it remained unexecuted. Baccio d' Agnolo also planned the Villa Borghese and the Bartolini palace, with other fine palaces and villas. The Bartolini palace was the first house to be given frontispieces of columns to the door and windows, previously confined to churches; and he was ridiculed by the Florentines for his innovation. Another much-admired work by him was the campanile of the church of Santo Spirito. His studio was the resort of the most celebrated artists of the day, Michelangelo, Sansovino, the brothers Sangallo and the young Raphael. He died in 1543, leaving three sons, all architects, the best-known being Giuliano.
BACH, JOHANN SEBASTIAN (1685–1750), German musical composer. The Bach family was of importance in the history of music for nearly two hundred years. Four branches of it were known at the beginning of the 16th century, and in 1561 we hear of Hans Bach of Wechmar who is believed to be the father of Veit Bach (born about 1555). The family genealogy, drawn up by J. Sebastian Bach himself and completed by his son Philipp Emanuel, describes Family. Veit Bach as the founder of the family, a baker and a miller, “whose zither must have sounded very pretty among the clattering of the mill-wheels.” His son, Hans Bach, “der Spielmann,” is the first professional musician of the family. Of Hans’s large family the second son, Christoph, was the grandfather of Sebastian Bach. Another son, Heinrich, of Arnstadt, had two sons, Johann Michael and Johann Christoph, who are among the greatest of J. S. Bach’s forerunners, Johann Christoph being now supposed (although this is still disputed) to be the author of the splendid motet, Ich lasse dich nicht (“I wrestle and pray”), formerly ascribed to Sebastian Bach. Another descendant of Veit Bach, Johann Ludwig, was admired more than any other ancestor by Sebastian, who copied twelve of his church cantatas and sometimes added work of his own to them.
The Bach family never left Thuringia until the sons of Sebastian went into a more modern world. Through all the misery of the peasantry at the period of the Thirty Years’ War this clan maintained its position and produced musicians who, however local their fame, were among the greatest in Europe. So numerous and so eminent were they that in Erfurt musicians were known as “Bachs,” even when there were no longer any members of the family in the town. Sebastian Bach thus inherited the artistic tradition of a united family whose circumstances had deprived them of the distractions of the century of musical fermentation which in the rest of Europe had destroyed polyphonic music.
Johann Sebastian Bach was baptized at Eisenach on the 23rd Biography. of March 1685. His parents died in his tenth year, and his elder brother, Johann Christoph, organist at Ohrdruf, took charge of him and taught him music. The elder brother is said to have been jealous of Sebastian’s talent, and to Biography.have forbidden him access to a manuscript volume of works by Froberger, Buxtehude and other great organists. Every night for six months Sebastian got up, put his hand through the lattice of the bookcase, and copied the volume out by moonlight, to the permanent ruin of his eyesight (as is shown by all the extant portraits of him at a later age and by the blindness of his last years). When he had finished, his brother discovered the copy and took it away from him. In 1700 Sebastian, now fifteen and thrown on his own resources by the death of his brother, went to Lüneburg, where his beautiful soprano voice obtained him an appointment at the school of St Michael as chorister. He seems, however, to have worked more at instrumental than at vocal music. Apart from the choristers’ routine, his position provided only for his general education, and we know little about his definite musical instructors. In any case he owed his musical development mainly to his own incessant study of classical and contemporary composers, such as Frescobaldi (c. 1587), Caspar Kerl (1628–1693), Buxtehude, Froberger, Muffat the elder, Pachelbel and probably Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741), the author of the Gradus ad Parnassum on which all later classical composers were trained. A prettier and no less authentic story than that of his brother’s forbidden organ-volume tells how, on his return from one of the many holiday expeditions which Bach made to Hamburg on foot to hear the great Dutch organist Reinken, he sat outside an inn longing for the dinner he could not afford, when two herring-heads were flung out of the window, and he found in each of them a ducat with which he promptly paid his way, not home, but back to Hamburg. At Hamburg, also, Keiser was laying the foundations of German opera on a splendid scale which must have fired Bach’s imagination though it never directly influenced his style. On the other hand Keiser’s church music was of immense importance in his development. In Celle the famous Hofkapelle brought the influence of French music to bear upon Bach’s art, an influence which inspired nearly all his works in suite-form and to which his many autograph copies of Couperin’s music bear testimony. Indeed, there is no branch of music, from Palestrina onwards, conceivably accessible in Bach’s time, of which we do not find specimens carefully copied in his own handwriting. On the other hand, when Bach, at the age of nineteen, became organist at Arnstadt, he found Lübeck within easy distance, and there, in October 1705, he went to hear Buxtehude, whose organ works show so close an affinity to Bach’s style that only their lack of coherence as wholes reveals to the attentive listener that with all their nobility they are not by Bach himself. Bach’s enthusiasm for Buxtehude caused him to outstay his leave by three months, and this, together with his
