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The form first appeared in the late Renaissance period.

It originated in northern Italy.

Several publications of the 1590s include toccatas, by composers like Girolamo Diruta, Adriano Banchieri, Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Luzzasco Luzzaschi and others.

These are keyboard compositions in which one hand, and then the other, performs virtuosic runs and brilliant cascading passages against a chordal accompaniment in the other hand.

Among the composers working in Venice at this time was the young Hans Leo Hassler, who studied with the Gabrielis ; he brought the form back with him to Germany.

It was in Germany where it underwent its highest development, culminating in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach more than a hundred years later.