The Renaissance Duomo of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, boasts of a magnificent dome by Brunelleschi, and its Baptistery the set of bronze doors carved by Ghiberti. Its singers' gallery was carved by Donatello. Amid artistic splendor which so endures in stone and bronze, the presence of the temporal (and thus transient) art of music may be forgotten. But the Cathedral archives, as well as those of the Baptistery and the Ss. Annunziata record the service for more than a decade of one of the greatest composers of music of the late fifteenth century, Heinrich Isaac. Though the singing establishments at the three churches were nominally independent, the Medici oligarchs were able to channel enough funds into their coffers to allow patronage of such musicians. This equivocal sacred/secular patronage helps to explain the contrasting elements in a piece such as Isaac's Missa La bassadanza, a cyclic mass ordinary cycle with a popular courtly dance tune as its compositional foundation.

In form, Isaac's mass follows well the compositional styles apparently popular in central Italy at the time. The five movements of the mass are unified by (somewhat different) elaborations of the same preexistent melody in the tenor voice (bass voice in Agnus Dei I and II). Internal sections of the longer or wordy movements (Gloria, Credo, and Sanctus) present contrasts in time signature, in different, reduced scoring, and in tighter imitative relationships between the voices. The Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and second Agnus, as well as several smaller musical sections, begin with a "headmotive" easily recognizable in an upper voice; this headmotive, also used imitatively in the middle of movements, is related to the descending interval of a melodic fourth, with which the tenor's cantus firmus begins. A brief triple-time section at the end of the Credo, the dramatic broadening of note-values at the end of the Sanctus, and the cantus firmus transposition and climactic melismas at the end of Agnus Dei III, each serve to climax their respective movement.

But instead of a sacred chant melody, or even a secular tune whose words could be sacralized in the worship context (such as "Comme femme déconfortée" to represent the sorrows of the Virgin Mary), Isaac's mass centers upon the tune of a courtly dance. The bassadanza (often paired with an alta danza, or saltarello) was a popular courtly recreation, marked by dignified pacing, and an elegant lift onto the toes before certain carefully-measured steps. Musicians, and any courtiers, attending the mass, would clearly recognize the La Spagna melody, consisting of a series of 45 equal-valued notes, which would have served as a repeated bass line for instrumental improvisation. It is perhaps no accident that the Agnus Dei II of this mass would contain a simpler three-voiced elaboration of the dance tune, as if evoking the actual sound—even at the conclusion of the Holy Mass itself—of the dance ensemble.

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