and was the first to discover the fact that, in playing double stops,
their accuracy can be determined by the production of a third sound. He
also wrote a little work on the execution and employment of the various
kinds of shakes, mordents, cadenzas, etc., according to the usage of the
classical Italian school.

Tartini's father, who was an elected Nobile of Parenzo, being a pious
Church benefactor, intended his son for the Church, and sent him to an
ecclesiastical school at Capo d'Istria, where he received his first
instruction in music. Finding himself very much averse to an
ecclesiastical career, Tartini entered the University of Padua to study
law, but this also proved distasteful to him. He was a youth of highly
impulsive temperament, and became so much enamoured of the art of
fencing that he, at one time, seriously contemplated adopting it as a
profession. This very impulsive nature caused him to fall in love with a
niece of the Archbishop of Padua, to whom he was secretly married before
he was twenty years of age.

The news of this marriage caused Tartini's parents to withdraw their
support from him, and it so enraged the archbishop that the bridegroom
was obliged to fly from Padua. After some wanderings he was received
into a monastery at Assisi, of which a relative was an inmate. Here he
resumed his musical studies, but though he learned composition of Padre
Boemo, the organist of the monastery, he was his own teacher on the
violin. The influence of the quiet monastic life caused a complete
change in his character, and he acquired the modesty of manner and
serenity of mind for which he was noted later in life.

One day, during the service, a gust of wind blew aside the curtain
behind which Tartini was playing, and a Paduan, who remembered the