Philippe Verdelot was among the most cunning composers of his generation. He seems to have guessed the importance that the madrigal (which was still in a fairly crude stage of development when he came along) would go on to have in European musical culture, and so he put most of his energies into developing it. His plan worked; his madrigals set virtually all the standards of the genre and continued to be influential long after his death, while his name became in his life a byword for good musicianship. Verdelot's output of madrigals fits fairly neatly into two parallel streams. In some pieces, he still seems caught up in the slightly outmoded formalisms of past genres, while in other works, such as Madonna il tuo bel viso, his style is as forward-looking as can be. Verdelot takes the dramatic and image-rich text (the kind later madrigalists would prefer) and makes a considerable effort to draw out many of the nuances of individual words, as well as making musical illustrations of the images. It is a clear precursor to the musica reservata of the following generation, wherein a perfect idealized unity between sounds and words was sought. An anonymous text, it seems that it was specially composed to be set to music, a feasible assumption that explains how the lines are handled: each bears its own little idea or image, offering a tasty opportunity to a madrigal composer. Although Verdelot doesn't quite take advantage of all the opportunities, there are fine and obvious moments where he does: the melismatic flourish at morte (dead), or the much more brilliant buildup of imitative entries of a climbing scale from the lower voices to the topmost on "It unfolds its sail to the wind." The sense of the cool, invigorating wind ballooning out in the crisp white sail is enough to momentarily take listerners away from their daily concerns. Most of the piece is carried out in a motet-like imitative polyphony that is a little stiff, but the progressive touches like the experimental cadences (listen to the rapid evaporation at the end of the second line) and word-painting are brilliant flares of thought that shine light into the work's murkier places.

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