by the numbers found in inventories of the musical instruments that belonged to certain courts of that time. One inventory written in 1589 referred to the musical instruments possessed by the court of Baden-Wurttemberg (located in Stuttgart): 220 transverse flutes, 48 recorders, 113 cornetts and 39 viols. The transverse flute also became popular outside of the court. Members of the bourgeoisie and amateur musicians among the nobles of both sexes were playing it in Italy, France and Holland.Despite the large number of transverse flutes found in court inventories all over Europe, playing music in flute consorts seemed to be considered some kind of French expertise in the sixteenth century. Frenchmen called for themselves the status of the best flautists in Europe - they also didn't really like the term "German flute". That wasn't mere vanity: French flautists held very important musical positions outside France, a fact that attests the high quality of their performance.The flute wasn't limited to military music and flute-consort music. It also appears in groups of diverse instruments. Such groupings weren't uncommon in the context of religious and private music. In 1563, in the Bavarian court located in Munich, Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594) started to use string instruments in religious music and, after that, started to use all kinds of instruments and voices. This painting (painted in 1520, approximately) shows three women practicing chamber music, in a private context, in a group of diverse instruments: the lute, the flute and the voice. Filadelfio Puglisi, a researcher who has studied the Renaissance flute in depth, had access to a Renaissance flute collection found in Verona, Italy. After comparing those flutes he found out some common characteristics between them:1.In most cases, the embouchure hole was oval and smaller than the embouchure hole of baroque flutes;2.To make fingering easier, the six finger-holes were placed in two groups of three;3.All the holes were aligned, a feature that allowed the flute to be held either to the right or to the left;4.The bore was semi-cylindrical;5.The walls of the instruments were relatively thin, a feature that contributed to their lightness;6.The pitch of the Verona flutes varied a lot, but two great pitch groups were found out: one in A=435hz (the "Kammerton", employed in private and festive music) and the other one in A=410hz (the "Chorton", employed in religious music). The Chorton was a whole tone lower than the Kammerton and the group of flutes in A=410hz was bigger than the other group in A=435hz.Some of the Renaissance flutes found in Verona.Instrumentalists tried to cultivate a singing style while playing - in other words, they wanted to make their instruments produce sounds which qualities resembled those of the human voice. Agricola encouraged the use of vibrato and many sources point out that instrumentalists considered that vibrato (produced by the air column or the fingers) was an essential element of the sound and its expressiveness. Renaissance flautists also gave great importance to the articulation of the sounds. As in speech, a clear articulation was considered indispensable for a good performance. Jambe de Fer encourages his readers to