Renaissance

“ The Renaissance stands not only for a revival of ancient forms in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but for a vast awakening in all departments of human enterprise, and the final abandonment of mediævalism with all its crude and crabbed methods and ways of thought. ”

“ No; the Renaissance did not exist for him who lived in a world of diaphanous form, colour and character, unsubstantial and unruffled; dreaming feebly and sweetly of transparent-cheeked Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes; of smooth-faced saints with well-combed beard and placid, vacant gaze, seated in well-ordered masses, holy with the purity of inanity ”

“ No more will anyone question that the Renaissance is a critical moment, a transition period, and a transformation analogous to that which we have noted in the individual, when there rises, opposed to imagination, a rival power. ”

“ The genius of the Renaissance set itself to reproduce this enchanted world of form and colour, traversed by thoughts and spiritual existences mysterious and beautiful, and the home of beings who had found this form and colour and these mysterious thoughts blend into a human life delicious in its very sorrows, grotesque and incongruous in its beauty, alluring and attractive amid all its griefs and hardships ”

“ The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming, like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes unlike themselves and each other ”

“ They would give heed, and to such extremes did many Renaissance men go in their worship of beauty that they prostituted her and debased themselves. The majority remained sound of heart, and though tortured with doubts, and stumbling again and again, they succeeded in making themselves worthy of communion with God. Last of all, the question might be asked : is the Renaissance more than a period of storm and stress, a link between the Middle Ages and Modern Times? Like every age, it is one of transition, but it is also one of glorious achievement. ”

“ One cannot fix a term to day or night, and the theory of the Renaissance as a kind of tropical dawn—a sudden passage to light from darkness—is not to be considered. The Renaissance was, and was the result of, a numerous and various series of events which followed and accompanied one another from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. First and most immediate in its influence on art and literature and thought, was the rediscovery of the ancient literatures. ”

“ This is not the place to repeat the charming story of the Renaissance, that movement which marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World, or to dwell on the spirit of the time which witnessed the liberation of reason and gave rise to that passionate recognition of humanity—that escape, "at first hesitating and then triumphant, from a circumscribed life of ecclesiastical tradition into "joyous freedom and unfettered spontaneity." ”

“ We have, however, abundant proof that the sacred fire of the love of Art and Letters was smouldering in France, Germany, and England—and when the inspiring breath of the Renaissance was wafted beyond the Alps a flame burst forth which has burned clearer and brighter with succeeding centuries. ”

“ It was the old way of true Renaissance—being indeed the way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man, perhaps with his soul—conceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times. ”

“ Then came the time which is called 'The Renaissance,' a word which means being born again, or a new awakening, when men began to draw real pictures of real things and fill the world with images of beauty. ”

“ When the Renaissance is at its height everything assumes a character of refined originality, and one feels, even in the most trivial details, that the excitements of social life have marvellously quickened the flight of the imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then an art arises greater even than that of the eras of tradition. The pathos of the dying and the inexpressible hope of the newly born find expression side by side; all chains are broken, and the world appears suddenly to be immeasurable. Is this what happened at the Renaissance? ”

“ The Renaissance had for its object the development of great personalities. The perfect freedom of the temperament in matters of art, the perfect freedom of the intellect in intellectual matters, the full development of the individual, were the things it aimed at. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So also with these seeming realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things scattered on the foreground, can handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical instruments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy ”

“ And as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage. ”

“ It may seem absurd to class them all together; yet there is no doubt that the French Revolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of religious feeling, landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry of Nature, are all signs of the same movement—of a new Renaissance. Limitations of every sort have been shaken off during the last century; all forms have been destroyed, all questions asked. ”

“ 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. ... 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. ... 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. ”

“ The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but one element or symptom. ”

“ The Renaissance, in the largest sense of the term, is the whole process of transition in Europe from the medieval to the modern order. The Revival of Learning, by which is meant more especially the resuscitated knowledge of classical antiquity, is the most potent and characteristic of the forces which operated in the Renaissance. That revival has two aspects. In one, it is the recovery of a lost culture ”

“ The word Renaissance means simply revival and it is not correctly used when we mean a distinct style led or inspired by one person. It was a great epoch, with individuality as its leading spirit, led by the inspiration of the Italian artists brought from Italy and molded by the genius of France. This renewal of classic feeling came at the psychological moment, for the true spirit of the great Gothic period had died. ”

“ During the Middle Ages, Art generally followed the inspirations of that Christian spirit which presided at the formation of this new world. It arose to reproduce in an admirable manner the religious ideal. Only towards the end of that period it searched out for beauty of form, and began to find it when the Renaissance made its appearance: the Renaissance, that is, the intellectual revolution, which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, restored among modern nations the sceptre to Literature and the Arts of antiquity. ”

“ People in a variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence changes. ”

“ The new religion, as I have called the love of glory, is in its very essence a thing of this world, founded as it is on human esteem. The boundless curiosity of the Renaissance led back inevitably to an interest in life and to an acceptance of things for what they were,—for their intrinsic quality. ”

“ The Renaissance was, on the contrary, born out of a passionate joy in nature, which joy was intensified by the unexpected possession of the literature of the past and by the discovery of new lands beyond the seas. ”

“ The Fine Arts of the Renaissance are in part a reflection of this decadent art of classic antiquity, and in part an expression of something quite different which was peculiar to the Italian genius at this time. To the man of the Renaissance the classic inspiration was necessarily different from what it had been to the man of antiquity. ”

“ The Renaissance changed all that. The lord entered the new world of ideas and refined sensuality; the peasant stayed where he was, or, as the last vestiges of spiritual religion began to disappear with the commons, sank lower. Popular art changed so gradually that in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century we still find, in remote corners, things that are rude but profoundly moving. ”

“ The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. ”

“ The Coming Renaissance.—The prognostication of the approach of a new Renaissance has quite naturally been received with incredulity. Is it not the fact that civilisation is in a thoroughly morbid condition bordering on hysteria, and was ever the outlook for culture darker than it is at this moment? ”

“ They still felt the impulse of the wonderful awakening of culture from, its barbaric sleep of centuries which men call the Renaissance; they were own children of the mighty stirring of Europe's conscience which we call the Reformation; and they and their children were to be prime actors in laying the foundations of human liberty in a new century and a new land. ”

“ One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. ”

“ The great change in ideas and ideals which, after the remarkable intellectual and artistic life of the Middle Ages, was manifested in the so-called Renaissance, is not always correctly conceived or fairly stated; and the character and merits of the Fine Arts of the Renaissance, as compared with those of mediæval times, have not, I think, been often set forth in an entirely true light. ”

“ The splendour of the Renaissance had thoroughly habituated her nobles to pleasures of the sense, and had enervated their proud, maritime character, while the great name of the republic robbed them of the caution for which they used to be conspicuous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ FRENCH SCHOOL. XVIth CENTURY.
(Comp. Dürer's title to Plutarch, 1513, and St. Ambrosius, 1520.)
THE RENAISSANCE.
What was at first an inspiriting, imaginative, and refining influence in art became finally a destructive force. The youthful spirit of the early Renaissance became clouded and oppressed, and finally crushed with a weight of pompous pedantry and affectation. The natural development of a living style in art became arrested, and authority, and an endeavour to imitate the antique, took its place. ”