In the second half of the 18th century the harmonic theories of the Venetian Enlightenment - its standard-bearers being Francesco Antonio Calegari, Francesco Antonio Vallotti and Giuseppe Tartini - aroused major quarrels at a European level, owing particularly to their inevitable collision with those of Jean-Baptiste Rameau, two of whose innovations in any case they had earlier discovered. These discoveries were unanimously judged as the pillars of modern harmony, i.e. that (1) any chord coincides harmonically with its inversion, and (2) the origin of the modern diatonic scale has to be identified in the consonant triads based on degrees I, IV, and V. Having fallen into oblivion starting from the very early 19th century, interest in the characters of this historical phase reawakened in the years 1945-1960, and this interest has developed and continued into the present century, with renewed attention to the contributions of Giordano Riccati, another important protagonist of the period, as well as of Alessandro Barca and Luigi Antonio Sabbatini.