The devoted scholarship that resurrected classic letters and philosophy was chiefly the work of Italy. There the first modern literature arose, out of that resurrection and that liberation; and though no Italian writer of the age could match Erasmus or Shakespeare, Erasmus himself yearned for the clear free air of Renaissance Italy, and the England of Elizabeth owed to Italy—to “Englishmen Italianate”—the seeds of its flowering. Ariosto and Sannazaro were the models and progenitors of Spenser and Sidney, and Machiavelli and Castiglione were powerful influences in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It is not certain that Bacon and Descartes could have done their work had not Pomponazzi and Machiavelli, Telesio and Bruno paved the way with their sweat and blood.
Yes, Renaissance architecture is depressingly horizontal, always excepting the lordly cupolas that rise over Florence and Rome. The Gothic style, ecstatically vertical, reflected a religion that pictured our terrestrial life as an exile for the soul, and placed its hopes and gods in the sky; classic architecture expressed a religion that lodged its deities in trees and streams and in the earth, and rarely higher than a mountain in Thessaly; it did not look upward to find divinity. That classic style, so cool and calm, could not fitly represent the turbulent Renaissance, but neither could it be allowed to die; rightly a generous emulation preserved its monuments, and transmitted its ideals and principals to be a part—a sharer but not a dictator —of our building art today. Italy could not equal Greek or Gothic architecture, nor Greek sculpture, nor, perhaps, the noblest flights of Gothic sculpture at Chartres and Reims; but it could produce an artist whose Medici tombs were worthy of Pheidias, and his Pietà of Praxiteles.
For Renaissance painting there shall be no word of apology; it is still the high point of that art in history. Spain approached that zenith in the halcyon days of Velásquez, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbarán, and El Greco; Flanders and Holland came not quite so close in Rubens and Rembrandt. Chinese and Japanese, painters scale heights of their own, and at times their pictures impress us as especially profound, if only because they see man in a large perspective; yet their cold, contemplative philosophy or decorative elegance is outweighed by the richer range of complexity and power, and the warm vitality of color, in the pictorial art of the Florentines, of Raphael and Correggio and the Venetians. Indeed, Renaissance painting was a sensual art, though it produced some of the greatest religious paintings, and—as on the Sistine ceiling—some of the most spiritual and sublime. But that sensuality was a wholesome reaction. The body had been vilified long enough; woman had borne through ungracious centuries the abuse of a harsh asceticism; it was good that life should reaffirm, and art enhance, the loveliness of healthy human forms. The Renaissance had tired of original sin, breast-beating, and mythical post-mortem terrors; it turned its back upon death and its face to life; and long before Schiller and Beethoven it sang an exhilarating, incomparable ode to joy.
The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the thousand-year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe. From Italy by a hundred routes the good news of the great liberation passed over mountains and seas to France, Germany, Flanders, Holland, and England. Scholars like Aleandro and Scaliger, artists like Leonardo, del Sarto, Primaticcio, Cellini, and Bordone took the Renaissance to France; Italian painters, sculptors, architects took it to Pesth, Cracow, Warsaw; Michelozzo carried it to Cyprus; Gentile Bellini ventured with it to Istanbul. From Italy Colet and Linacre brought it back with them to England, Agricola and Reuchlin to Germany. The flow of ideas, morals, and arts continued to run northward from Italy for a century. From 1500 to 1600 all western Europe acknowledged her as the mother and nurse of the new civilization of science and art and the “humanities”; even the idea of the gentleman, and the aristocratic conception of life and government, came up from the south to mold the manners and states of the north. So the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance declined in Italy, was an age of exuberant germination in France, England, Germany, Flanders, and Spain.
For a time the tensions of Reformation and Counter Reformation, the debates of theology and the wars of religion, overlaid and overwhelmed the influence of the Renaissance; men fought through a bloody century for the freedom to believe and worship as they pleased, or as pleased their kings; and the voice of reason seemed stilled by the clash of militant faiths. But it was not altogether silent; even in that unhappy desolation men like Erasmus, Bacon, and Descartes echoed it bravely, gave it fresh and stronger utterance; Spinoza found for it a majestic formulation; and in the eighteenth century the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was reborn in the French Enlightenment. From Voltaire and Gibbon to Goethe and Heine, to Hugo and Flaubert, to Taine and Anatole France, the strain was carried on, through revolution and counterrevolution, through advance and reaction, somehow surviving war, and patiently ennobling peace. Everywhere today in Europe and the Americas there are urbane and lusty spirits—comrades in the Country of the Mind—who feed and live on this legacy of mental freedom, esthetic sensitivity, friendly and sympathetic understanding; forgiving life its tragedies, embracing its joys of sense, mind, and soul; and hearing ever in their hearts, amid hymns of hate and above the cannon’s roar, the song of the Renaissance.
THANK YOU, FRIEND READER
Bibliographical Guide
to editions referred to in the Notes
Books starred are recommended for further study
ABRAHAMS, ISRAEL, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 1896.
ADAMS, BROOKS, The New Empire, New York, 1903.
ADDISON, JOSEPH, et al., The Spectator, New York, 1881, 8v.
ADDISON, JULIA D., Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages, Boston, 1908.
ANDERSON, W. J., Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1898.
ARETINO, PIETRO, Works: Dialogues, New York, 1926.
ARIOSTO, LODOVICO, Orlando furioso, Firenze, n.d.
ASCHAM, ROGER, The Scholemaster, London, 1863.
ASHLEY, W. J., Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, New York, 1894 and 1936, 2v.
*BACON, FRANCIS, Philosophical Works, ed. J. M. Robertson, London, 1905.
BAEDEKER, KARL, Northern Italy, London, 1913.
BALCARRES, LORD, Evolution of Italian Sculpture, London, 1909.
BANDELLO, MATTEO, Novels, tr. Payne, London, 1890, 6v.
*BARNES, H. E., History of Western Civilization, New York, 1935, 2v.
BASLER, E., Leonardo, Collection des maîtres, Braun, Paris, n.d.
BEARD, MIRIAM, History of the Business Man, New York, 1938.
BEAZLEY, C. R., The Dawn of Modern Geography, Oxford, 1906, 3V.