How is the northern Renaissance different from the Italian Renaissance?

Many familiar instruments were invented and perfected in late Renaissance Italy, such as the violin, the earliest forms of which came into use in the 1550s. By the late 16th century Italy was the musical centre of Europe. Almost all of the innovations which were to define the transition to the Baroque period originated in northern Italy in the last few decades of the century.

In Venice, the polychoral productions of the Venetian School, and associated instrumental music, moved north into Germany; in Florence, the Florentine Camerata developed monody, the important precursor to opera, which itself first appeared around 1600; and the avant-garde, manneristic style of the Ferrara school, which migrated to Naples and elsewhere through the music of Carlo Gesualdo, was to be the final statement of the polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Burckhardt, Jacob (1878), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. (2008), The Science of Leonardo.

Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance. Hagopian, Viola L. "Italy", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.