Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 | Page 9

with the religious feelings of the people,
formulæ from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and
confusing to the worshiper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter
to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had
adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the
skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him. But with the
dawning of the Renaissance, a new spirit in the arts arose. Men began
to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient
study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling
and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost
fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude; he drew the body in
every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted
the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he
had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the
cloister-frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose
above the ancient symbols, and brought heaven down to earth. By
drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by
dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of
beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church.
The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical
perfection, and to introduce 'un bel corpo ignudo' into the composition
was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations of the

Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the host,
and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it expression.
Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new
world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was
revealed to their astonished eyes. Thus art, which had begun by
humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its
students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing
itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty
and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from
ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting.
Gazing at Michael Angelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are
indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of
these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the
sculpture of Pheidias. Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring
midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the
apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than
the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout
the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional.
Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and
plunged into Paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with
architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by
introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.
Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern
world a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of
antique civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements
within the tomb of the mediæval cloister. It was scholarship which
revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human
thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life
regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the
Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the
prose of Boethius--and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had
actually been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan,
Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to
the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin
literature. At the same time the Bible in its original tongues was
rediscovered. Mines of Oriental learning were laid bare for the students

of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. The Aryan and Semitic revelations
were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the
voluminous subject-matter of scholarship 'Litteræ Humaniores,'--the
more human literature, or the literature that humanizes.
There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring
over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican
Library in 1453, Cosimo de Medici,