Cinquecento

“ During the whole of the 15th century Europe had been affected by what is known as the Renaissance movement, which marked the transition from the medieval to the modern order. This movement, caused by the growth of learning, had its first home in Italy, which had witnessed a The Renaissance. marvellous revival of interest in classical antiquity, in painting and in sculpture, accompanied by a keen intellectual activity in religious and political, no less than in literary matters. ”

“ How did the reverence of Europe settle at one time on the sword of Edward the Third, and at another on the periwig of Louis the Fourteenth? These and similar inquiries will lead us to the real principles and motive forces of a particular age, as they distinguished it from other ages. We shall label the centuries, as it were, with their characteristic marks, and know where to look for thoughts and incidents of a particular class and type.
Let us look at the first century.
Throughout the civilized world there is nothing but Rome. ”

“ Art gaining but few entirely new forms, rather subjecting all that had gone before to a new treatment, which in the hands of the great artists of the period produced agreeable results, showing the importance of general design, rendering even incongruous materials pleasing from that cause alone. [pg 184] The Cinque-cento has been considered the goal of the Renaissance and its characteristics,—strap, tracery, arabesque, and pierced scroll-work, a mixture of the conventional with natural forms, and every detail of ancient Art,—producing, under different masters, varied results. ”

“ If we could affix to each century as characteristic a presentment as those portraits do of the steel-clad hero of Towton, or the be-wigged, be-buckled courtier of George the Second, our object would be gained. We should see a whole history in a glance at a century’s face. If it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, so much the more easy would it be to recognise the likeness. If the century was a warlike, quarrelsome century, and had scars across its brow ”

“ But much of the darkness of what are more fitly called the Middle Ages is due to the dimness of vision of those who have baptized the period with a forbidding name, and if we called the Renaissance an age of light, is it not because we are dazzled by mere glamour? After all, the Renaissance was the offspring of the Middle Ages, and a child must frequently bear the burdens of its parents. ”

“ If we accept the usual historical division which places the Middle Ages during the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire, in the Fifth Century and the fall of the Grecian Empire of Constantinople, about the middle of the Fifteenth, the Thirteenth Century must be considered the culmination of that middle age. It is three centuries before the Renaissance, and to most minds that magical word represents the beginning of all that is modern, and therefore all that is best, in the world. ”

“ Since, however, we have come to view the Renaissance in its larger aspects as far more than a classical revival, its relations to the Middle Ages are seen to have been much more intimate246 and important than was once supposed. The evolution is at times rapid, but the Trecento grows out of the centuries which preceded as naturally as it grew into the Quattrocento which followed. ”

“ It is surely worth while, therefore, to make an attempt to individualize the centuries, not by affixing to them any arbitrary marks of one’s own, but by taking notice of the distinguishing quality they possess, and grouping round that, as a centre, the incidents which either produce this characteristic or are produced by it. What should we call the present century, for instance? We should at once name it the Century of Invention. ”

“ Fortunately, just at this time, the great wave of the Renaissance, the new birth of letters, having spent itself in Italy and crossed France and Spain, reached the shores of England. There it was eagerly welcomed by men, who, if they had not the poise and mental reach of the Italians of the Renaissance, or the gayety and sense of form of their French contemporaries, had yet more daring and more intellectual curiosity. ”

“ I want to deepen and make clear to you this consciousness that the world has had essentially a Trinity of ages—the Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but united in the spirit of their age,—the Classical Age having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,—the Middle Age having its Goths and Franks, Lombards and Italians,—the Modern Age having its French and English, Spaniards and Germans ”

“ The Quattrocento marks the transition from the active, original, rough, strong civilization of the Middle Ages to the verbal, imitative, insincere, pacific civilization of the succeeding centuries. In the Quattrocento the man of action yields to the man of words; the book takes the place of the sword; the fortress becomes a villa garden; skeptical dilettanteism casts out faith. Great words win honor such as hitherto had been accorded to great deeds alone. Achievement ended, men tell of past achievement. ”

“ But the human spirit could not be forever held in bondage, and, after almost a millennium of repression and uniformity, various factors that had accumulated within the Middle Ages produced an intellectual awakening the Renaissance, that we know as the ‘Renaissance.’ Its vitality lasted during the fifteenth century in Italy and to the close of the sixteenth in the Northern countries, but by the dawn of the seventeenth century it had everywhere degenerated into a dry and mechanical study of the classics. ”

“ It is dangerous to attempt to characterise the work of whole centuries in single phrases; but there are cases, and this seems to be one of them, where the progress of a movement can be marked out with approximate accuracy, and its stages defined, in such a way. The three centuries, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth, with which we have been principally occupied, had each its special form of contribution to the movement which we have called the Christian Renaissance. The fifteenth century was the age of collection: the documents were brought together, and the great libraries formed. ”

“ What is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. ”

“ The anterior and less glorious Renaissance, the Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Age itself, a revival which came to a stop and could not successfully develop itself, but which has yet left profound traces in our spirit and our literature,--this revival belongs chiefly to France. France, then, may well serve as a typical country wherein to trace the mediæval growth of intellect and learning ”

“ It was the age of feudalism, chivalry, and war, but towards its close a time of comparative civilisation and progress, of darkness giving way to the light which followed; the night of the Middle Ages preceding the dawn of the Renaissance. ”

“ The fifteenth century, the last century of an age, was a backwater in education as in literature. The great revival was to come. The fifteenth century was indeed a century of revolution in so far as under the almost placid surface of continuity and conformity, there were forces of revolt at work, probing, accumulating knowledge and experience, perhaps unconsciously, for the day of liberation and change. ”

“ Let us talk of our college days, of our travels, of war, of soldiers, and of Italy!
XII. We old classmates will many of us doubtless live to see the twentieth century. Strange thought! I know, of course, that the transition from nineteen hundred to nineteen hundred and one will seem as natural as that from ninety-nine to a hundred, or from this year to next. And yet it seems to me that to see the first dawn of the new century will be like reaching the summit of some high mountain, and looking out over new countries and new horizons. ”

“ The middle of the sixteenth century in France is thus marked by a curious blend of those two distinct movements in human history which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the blend is nowhere more picturesque than in the life of Robert Estienne. ”

“ Hitherto we have viewed the age mainly through the personality of individuals. It remains to consider some of the features of the Renaissance when it had spread across the Alps—to France, to Spain, to Switzerland, to Germany, to England—and some of the contrasts that it presents with the earlier movement in Italy. The story of the Italian Renaissance has often been told; and we need not go back upon it here. On the side of the revival of learning it was without doubt the great age. The importance of its discoveries, the fervour of its enthusiasm have never been equalled. ”

“ Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph,... Hitherto there has been only this great war: there has never yet been a more decisive question than the Renaissance,—my question is the question of the Renaissance:—there has never been a more fundamental, a more direct and a more severe attack, delivered with a whole front upon the centre of the foe. ”

“ There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great resources in the true middle age. ”

“ Too recent to appear picturesque, the Middle Ages were, to the pioneers of the new era, out of date and old-fashioned, terms far more injurious than the most violent word-war of the preachers. Filled with the new wine of the Renaissance, these youthful enthusiasts formed the nucleus of that phalanx of life-loving, [Pg 259] exuberant personalities who, throwing all their energies into the glorification of liberty, fame, pleasure, and earthly beauty, gave us subsequently the Elizabethan age. ”

“ Roman, French, Renaissance, and Tudor stewed together, capped by mansard roofs, and decorated with vagaries from the fret-saw, the lathe, and the cold chisel in the hands of bumpkins—we are sadly in need of a revolution in all this. ”

“ The Renaissance was a movement of civilization not less important than the Reformation or the Revolution, and to Italy, as its source, the debt of the world is great. But the Renaissance was not conveyed to Europe by the literature of its corruption ”

“ The Renaissance, a noble and vividly European thing, was much older than the Reformation, which was its perversion and corruption. The doors upon modern knowledge had been opened before the soul, which was to enter them, had been cut off from its fellows. ”

“ The sixteenth century cannot be compared with the nineteenth century in the variety and scope of scientific discoveries; but, compared with the ages which had preceded it, it was a memorable epoch, marked by the simultaneous breaking up of the darkness of mediaeval Europe, and the bursting forth of new energies in all departments of human thought and action. In that century arose great artists, poets, philosophers, theologians, reformers, navigators, jurists, statesmen, whose genius has scarcely since been surpassed. In Italy it was marked by the triumphs of scholars and artists ”

“ The years from 1450 to 1500 are as important as the years from 1500 to 1550,—nay, to the thoughtful historian, that silent period of incubation is perhaps of deeper interest than the violent outburst of the sixteenth century. But where, during those years, are the men of sufficient eminence to represent the age in which they lived? ”

“ For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the Renaissance--shows more of the travail of the birth of our modern mind and life--than the fourteenth, and even more than the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century. ”

“ Walsh's book, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, will startle many readers, but we respectfully commend to the open-minded his presentation of that great epoch. A century that witnessed such extraordinary achievements in architecture, in arts and crafts, in education, and in literature and law, as did the Thirteenth, is not to be lightly dismissed or unfavorably compared with periods nearer our own. ”

“ Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in 1800 was radiantly clear to all men—the glory and the wonder, the endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. ”

“ The Reformation was the outcome of two forces, independent in origin, and never wholly in agreement: the Renaissance, and the desire for reform in dogma and practice.The Renaissance and the Reformation. Of these, the first owes its birth to Italy. The Italians, despairing of political unity or stability, yet excelling other people in material prosperity and comfort, betook themselves to the study of the past for which their unbroken connection with the language and memories of Rome well fitted them. ”

“ So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins, the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak, the first feeble steps towards coming into being. ”