This chapter introduces one of most unusual madrigals in Strozzi’s Opus 1, Al Battitor di bronzo della sua crudelissima Dama. Giulio Strozzi’s sonnet takes its inspiration from one of the most practiced themes of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, that of the exclusus amator, the excluded lover. While many such poems focus on the door itself Strozzi’s poem brings to the fore, instead, the plight of the doorknocker itself, for it (and the madrigal’s music) will only find its repose after the beloved allows the lover to enter her home. It was in Venice that bronze objects, with their innate sensuality, reached their greatest heights. The Strozzis’ madrigal, then, celebrates one of the city’s highest art forms through a combination of literary wit and musical inventiveness.