Quattrocento

“ 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. ”

“ No one, not even in the past, has ever reproduced the fine velvets of the Quattrocento and early Cinquecento with complete success.
Methods of ageing modern stuffs which have not the advantage of the genuine hues of age of old imitations, greatly resemble in general lines those adopted to give an appearance of age to other objects. If the colouring is crude and too new looking, the stuff is exposed to atmospheric action, rain, dew and sunshine. ”

“ The intellectual movement to which we apply the name Renaissance in its narrower sense [Footnote: In the more inclusive sense the Renaissance of course began in the time of Cimabue and Dante, but it was not till the latter half of the fifteenth century that it became a pervading force outside of Italy.] has many aspects. Whatever views we may happen to hold as to schools of painting and architecture, it is indisputable that a revolution was wrought by the work of Raphael and Leonardo, Michael Angelo and Titian, and the crowd of lesser great men who learned from them. ”

“ It is thus we revert across comparative barrenness to the Renaissance, beyond which, and hidden, lie the earlier glories of Etruria and Græco-Italy. As we turn to France the sun is in front of us, striking full upon a height still cloud-capt and unrevealed, and bathing the intervening undulating landscape in the fulness of its undimmed splendor. With France the present sheds lustre, life, and light upon a long past beginning with pre-Roman Gallia, and extending through Roman domination, the darkness of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance to the present time. ”

“ But it is not so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and painting—work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself—but rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which those French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissance within the middle age. ”

“ Among the many influences that were stirring the artistic minds of the Renaissance there were two of chief importance, the Neo-pagan revival, and the true intellectual life of the people which was independent of the retrospective movement, and had been growing up through the Middle Ages, The most sterling qualities of the artistic products of the period are due to this intellectual life, and Florentine and Venetian painting, the two most admirable phases of the supreme art of Italy, are the finest expression of this. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If such be your pleasure, you can, with some plausibility, represent the Renaissance as darker than the Middle Ages. Machiavelli, [1] the Medicis, and the Borgias have long been regarded as sin incarnate in odious forms. Making all due allowances for exaggeration and perversion of truth, the Renaissance was not a golden age, and the dramas of horror [2] are something more than the nightmares of a madman. And yet it is a luminous age. The sun has its spots, and the light of the Renaissance is all the more intense because of the blackness of the intermingling shadows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies,—in that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type. ”

“ It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that this great classical revival in Italy came, this re-birth of a true sense of beauty which is called the Renaissance. It was an age of wonders, of great artistic creations, and was one of the great epochs of the world, one of the turning points of human existence. It covered so large a field and was so many-sided that only careful study can give a full realization of the giants of intellect and power who made its greatness, and who left behind them work that shows the very quintessence of genius. ”

“ THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL LEARNING.—About the beginning of the fourteenth century there sprung up in Italy a great enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature and art. This is what is generally known as the Italian Renaissance, or the New Birth.
The Renaissance divides itself as follows: 1. The revival of classical learning; 2. The revival of classical art. It is with the first only, the intellectual and literary phase of the movement, that we are now concerned. This feature of the movement is called Humanism, and the promoters of it are known as Humanists. ”

“ 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 Middle Ages, in fact, came to an end at different times in different fields of human activity.
ORIGINAL HOME OF THE RENAISSANCE The name Renaissance applied, at first, only to the rebirth or revival of men's interest in the literature and art of classical antiquity. Italy was the original home of this Renaissance. There it first appeared, there it found widest acceptance, and there it reached its highest development. From Italy the Renaissance gradually spread beyond the Alps, until it had made the round of western Europe. ”

“ The period we are wont to call the Renaissance appears, then, to be in certain respects a period of weakening and decline. And if Italy would return to a life more intense and more energetic than that which now she leads amid verbal pyrotechnics and the academic discourses of Parliament, she must resolutely expel the dangerous maladies which the Renaissance introduced into her blood, must return to deeper and more bitter springs, must forget the lust of ornament and the delights of rhetoric, must set herself to action rather than to speech, to new achievement rather than to admiration. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The Italian Renaissance was little more than the harvest-time of medieval Italy, the glorious evening of a day which had dawned with the Fourth Crusade and had reached high noon in the lifetimes of Dante and Giotto. In the fifteenth century the aptitudes which had ripened in the intense and crowded life of turbulent republics were concentrated upon art and letters. ”

“ Hitherto the new learning had been in a great measure confined to Italy, but with the invasion of Charles VIII., which commences a long period of French and Spanish occupation of Italian soil, the Renaissance, especially on its artistic side, began to find its way into the neighbouring states, and through them into England. It is the old story, so familiar to sociologists, of a lower civilization falling under the spell of the culture exhibited by a more advanced subject population, of a conqueror worshipping the gods of the conquered. ”

“ For here, at least, is one spot left in the world, where, although Renaissance and Reformation, Revolution and Risorgimento, have swept round it, the Middle Ages still reign a living reality, in their noblest aspect, with the poverelli of the Seraphic Father; and the mystical light, that shone out on the day of the Stigmata, still burns: "while the eternal ages watch and wait." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Reformation, inspired by the same energy of resuscitated life as the Renaissance, assisted by the same engines of the printing-press and paper, using the same apparatus of scholarship, criticism, literary skill, being in truth another manifestation of the same world-movement under a diverse form, now posed itself as an irreconcilable antagonist to Renaissance Italy. It would be difficult to draw any comparison between German and Italian humanists to the disparagement of the former. ”

“ In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of antique monuments. ”

“ But the imagination born of the love of beautiful and suggestive detail soars higher; become what I would call the lyric art of the Renaissance, the art which not merely gives us beauty, but stirs up in ourselves as much beauty again of stored-up impression, reaches its greatest height in certain Venetian pictures of the early sixteenth century. Pictures of vague or enigmatic subject, or no subject at all, like Giorgione's Fête Champêtre and Soldier and Gipsy, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, The Three Ages of Man, and various smaller pictures by Bonifazio, Palma, Basaiti ”

“ The work accomplished by the Italian Renaissance claims the lasting gratitude of mankind. In the interval between the time of Petrarch and that of Leo X, a space of about a hundred and seventy years, ardent and unceasing labours bridged the gulf between the medieval and the modern world. Latin, the universal language, was purged from barbarism. Latin literature was brought back into the full light of intelligent study. Greek was restored to the West. ”

“ 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. ”