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 IHOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | 
 
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John Galen Howard 
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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 No. 87 
 
 Editors: 
 
 HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
 Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., 
 
 LL.D., F.B.A. 
 Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
 Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 
 
THE HOME UNIVEESITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERI^ KNOWLEDGE 
 
 16mo cloth, 50 cents net, postpaid 
 
 LITERATURE AND ART 
 
 Already Published 
 
 SHAKESPEARE By John Masefield 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE- 
 MODERN By G. H. Mair 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE- 
 MEDIEVAL By W. P. Ker 
 
 LANDMARKS IN FRENCH 
 
 LITERATURE By G. L. Strachey 
 
 ARCHITECTURE By W. R. Lethaby 
 
 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE . . By L. Pearsall Smith 
 WRITING ENGLISH PROSE . . By W. T. Brewster 
 GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS . ByW. P. Trent and John 
 
 Erskine 
 DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE By John Bailey 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LIT- 
 ERATURE By G. K. Chesterton 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF GER- 
 MANY By J. G. Robertson 
 
 PAINTERS AND PAINTING . . By Frederick Wedmork 
 SHELLY, GODWIN, AND THEIR 
 
 CIRCLE By H. N. Brailsford 
 
 ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL . By Miss Jane Harrison 
 EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE ... By Gilbert Murray 
 CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES . . By Miss G. E. Hadow 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK 
 
 AND INFLUENCE By A. C. Brock 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE By Edith Sichel 
 
 ELIZABETHAN. LITERATURE . By J. M. Robertson 
 
 Future Issues 
 
 ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAIS- 
 SANCE By Roger E. Fry 
 
 SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY AND 
 LITERATURE By T. C. Snow 
 
 HISTORY -AND LITERATURE . 
 
 OF SPAIN By J. Fitzmaurick-Kelly 
 
 LATIN LITERATURE By J. S. Phillimore 
 
 LITERARY TASTE By Thomas Seccombe 
 
 GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA . By C. T. Hagberg Wright 
 MILTON By John Bailey 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 EDITH SICHEL 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "CATHERINE DE MEDICI," "MEN AND WOMEN 
 OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 LONDON 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
Ref>la^iM HIT rvr 
 
 GIFT 
 
55 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. rAOB 
 
 I INTRODUCTORY o o • . 7 
 
 II THE MEDICI IN FLORENCE o « 25 
 
 I THE RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE. 
 II LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO. 
 
 (JX L TH E RENAISSANCE IN ROME . . 94 
 
 IV BALD AS BARE CASTIGLIONE AND THE 
 
 WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE . 129 
 
 V THE CYNICS AND THE SWASHBUCKLERS 
 
 OF THE RENAISSANCE . . . 140 
 
 VI THE FRUITS OF THE RENAISSANCE . 157 
 
 VII THE RENAISSANCE OF THE NORTHERN 
 
 RACES 164 
 
 VIII THE THINKERS OF THE NORTHERN 
 
 RACES 192 
 
 IX THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE . .215 
 
 X THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE . . 229 
 
 BOOKS RECOMMENDED , o . 251 
 
 INDEX o 255 
 
 M842807 
 
Volumes of kindred interest already published in 
 the Library are: 
 
 Mediaeval Europe. By H. W. C. Davis. (Maps,) 
 
 The Papacy and Modern Times (1303-1870). By Canon 
 Wm. Barry, D.D. 
 
 English Literature : Mediaeval. By Prof. W. P. Ker. 
 
 English Literature : Modern. By Gr. H. Mair 
 
 Architecture. By Prof. W. R Lethaby. (Illustrated.) 
 
 Painters and Painting. By Sir F. Wedmore. (Illus- 
 trated. ) 
 
 Landmarks in French Literature. By G. L. Strachey. 
 
 The Literature of Germany. By Prof. J. G. Robertson 
 
THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Michael Angelo's great painting of the 
 newly created Adam on the ceiling of the 
 Sistine Chapel might be taken as a symbol 
 of the Renaissance, of the time when man 
 was, as it were, re-created more glorious than 
 before, with a body naked and unashamed, 
 and a strong arm, unimpaired by fasting, 
 outstretched towards life and light. Defini- 
 tions are generally misleading, and it is easier 
 to represent the Renaissance by a symbol 
 than to define it. It was a movement, a 
 revival of man's powers, a reawakening of 
 the consciousness of himself and *of the 
 universe — a movement which spread over 
 Western Europe, and may be said to have 
 lasted over two centuries. It was between 
 
 1400 and 1600 that it held full sway. Like 
 
 7 
 
8 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 other movements it had forerunners, but, 
 unlike other movements, it was circumscribed 
 by no particular aim, and the fertilizing wave 
 which passed over Italy, (Germany, France, 
 England and, in a much fainter degree, over 
 Spain, to leave a fresh world behind it, seems 
 more like a phenomenon of nature than a 
 current of history — rather an atmosphere 
 surrounding men than a distinct course 
 before them. The new birth was the result 
 of a universal impulse, and that impulse 
 was preceded by something like a revelation, 
 a revelation of intellect and of the possi- 
 bilities in man. And like the Christian revela- 
 tion in the spiritual world, so the Renaissance 
 in the natural, meant a temper of mind, a 
 fresh vision, a source of thoughts and works, 
 rather than shaped results. When it crys- 
 tallized into an aesthetic ritual, it fell into 
 decadence and corruption. 
 
 But before that happened, its real task 
 had been accomplished — a complex task, in 
 which certain elements stand out. Two main 
 things there were which the Renaissance of 
 Western Europe signified : it signified Eman- 
 cipation and Expression. The Renaissance 
 is a loose term which has served to cover 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 many issues — the Revival of Learning, the 
 regeneration of art, the revolt against the 
 Schoolmen, the expansion of men's thought 
 with the expansion of the world beyond the 
 seas. And it has been ascribed to many 
 external causes greater and less. The death 
 of feudalism had given free play to the 
 individual and had weakened authority. The 
 famous taking of Constantinople by the 
 Turks in 1453, which put an end to the Greek 
 Empire, had sent Greek scholars wandering 
 over the world and shipped west into Italy 
 a glorious cargo of looted manuscripts and 
 sculptures. The discovery of printing, with 
 the consequent circulation of books and of 
 thought, produced a change that was im- 
 measurable; while the discovery of America 
 and the obvious effect that it produced upon 
 trade profoundly modified the laws of wealth 
 and the possibilities of transit. But all these 
 outward events were only visible signs of a 
 great motive power that grew from within; 
 of the reassertion of Nature, and of her rights, 
 against asceticism ; of the disinterested desire 
 for knowledge for its own sake — not the 
 Schoolman's desire for logical results, or that 
 of the alchemist who regarded science as a 
 
10 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 means to find the philosopher's stone, but 
 for something far wider. Rabelais' giant 
 baby. Prince Gargantua, born in the open 
 air, in the midst of a festival, waking to life 
 parched with thirst and calling loudly for 
 drink, must have been a conscious symbol of 
 the child of the Renaissance, who came forth 
 into the world unswaddled, and athirst, to 
 drink deep and grow strong enough for the 
 overturning of false barriers, and the re- 
 instatement of those senses which religion 
 had taught him to contemn. Beauty was 
 manifested to man afresh — beauty and joy 
 which he had learnt to regard as the deadly 
 foes of Christianity. And, inspired by new- 
 found marbles and manuscripts, in a kind of 
 intoxication, he once more embraced Paganism 
 and Nature, and acknowledged man's body 
 to be the exponent, not the adversary, of his 
 soul. 
 
 Here there comes in the second great 
 element of the Renaissance — Expression. 
 Expression implies a consciousness of that 
 which is expressed. In the Middle Ages 
 expression in words or stone or painting was 
 naif, a matter of narrative and of symbols, 
 prescribed mostly by tradition. If personal 
 
INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 force pierced through, it was accidental — 
 when men of exceptional gifts happened to 
 be employed. But as people became more 
 conscious of themselves and the world, and 
 began to want to define their relations to- 
 wards it, and when they finally reawakened 
 to a sense of beauty, emotion was kindled and 
 expression sought and found. There arose, 
 first in Italy, then in other lands, a perfect 
 passion for language. The fuel was ready, 
 the re-discovery of the classics set it alight. 
 The unearthing of manuscripts in remote and 
 forgotten monasteries, the publication of the 
 works of Virgil and Seneca, Plato and Aris- 
 totle, with a score of other ancient authors, 
 acted upon men's imaginations. Scholarship 
 in those days was no set science; it involved 
 risk, it unfolded unknown vistas. Like all 
 else, like science itself, it was bathed in 
 an atmosphere of poetry. Men approached 
 new-found manuscripts with excitement and 
 reverence. 
 
 When Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) dis- 
 covered an ungarbled text of Quintilian's 
 Institutions, there was an almost religious 
 exaltation; while the great Lorenzo Valla 
 (1406-1457) urged the claims of Latin with 
 
12 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the zeal of a propagandist. Scholars and 
 students unknown to one another corre- 
 sponded all the world over, formed friend- 
 ships, compared texts, communicated fresh 
 niceties of erudition. The Scaligers in 
 Verona, the Estiennes in France, the pre- 
 eminent Erasmus of the Netherlands, the 
 rest of that wonderful band of men who tried 
 to apply learning to life and went by the 
 name of Humanists, revealed and increased 
 a hundredfold the powers and possibilities 
 of language. And in doing so they per- 
 formed a work more important for the nations 
 than scholarship. They increased vocabulary, 
 and with it the national mind. Few words 
 mean few ideas, and vocabulary is a fairly 
 safe index of a country's intellectual outlook. 
 Literature is, foremost, a sweetening and 
 civilizing influence. But, unconsciously, it 
 has a further power, not deeper, but more 
 far-reaching — the faculty to propagate words 
 and widen the horizon. This is what hap- 
 pened in the early Renaissance; presently 
 scholarship ceased to be emotional, it became 
 prosaic, and then it grew formal. Words 
 fresh from the mint were over-used and, 
 turning against themselves, fmall)^ hardened 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 into shibboleths or eupheuisms. Humanists 
 gave place to pedants. But the words intro- 
 duced by scholars quickly filtered into common 
 speech ; the vulgar tongue was enriched ; and 
 the spirit of research went outside the classics, 
 revising old folk-songs, forming schools of 
 popular poets. The Stornelli and Rispetti 
 (songs of the country-side, many of which are 
 still existent), the Ballate (dance-songs), the 
 sacred songs, or Laude, and such-like tradi- 
 tional verse, served as a ready means for 
 the ripening of the Italian mother-tongue and 
 the rehabilitation of homely themes. And in 
 France Fables, and Romances of chivalry did 
 much in the same fashion to keep the French 
 language alive. The exclusive employment 
 of Latin in the world of letters had been 
 the link between the Middle Ages and the 
 Renaissance. The growth of national speech 
 and its gradual encroachment upon Latin as 
 a literary medium was the link with modern 
 times. In later days this growth, by these 
 means, formed such natural poets in Italy 
 as Lorenzo de' Medici, Poliziano and Pulci, 
 or as Villon and Marot in France. Literature 
 became what it was meant to be, the propertj^ 
 of the people. 
 
14 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Language, however, is but one part of 
 expression, and art was, perhaps, the most 
 potent and enduring means of self -revelation 
 chosen by the Renaissance. In painting, in 
 sculpture, in chiselled gems and goldsmiths' 
 work, that wonderful period, flowered and 
 seeded, as fertile as if it were a second Nature 
 with its own laws and seasons, until expres- 
 sion degenerated into over-expression and art 
 grew decadent and died of surfeit. 
 
 This emancipation, this power of expression, 
 were manifest in every direction. Men's 
 minds were in love — there was not a dry place 
 throughout the realm of knowledge. If the 
 investigation of language was poetic, the study 
 of grammar was a high adventure and the 
 science of the Law became romantic. For it 
 was now that the false Decretals — ^those so- 
 called Sybilline Leaves upon which the theolo- 
 gians had based the legal system — ^were proved 
 to be forgeries and that many found in Roman 
 Law the supreme wor.d of wisdom, while the 
 complex relations of war and commerce pro- 
 duced the need and the rudimentary outlines of 
 a law between the nations. The work of such 
 a great legal initiator as the Frenchman, Cujas 
 (1522-1590), gives life to dry bones. The 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 enthusiasm for Oriental learning, meanwhile, 
 produced a great band of Orientalists, pundits 
 in Sanscrit or Hebrew, scholars of the Talmud 
 or the Koran, who thus indirectly stimulated 
 thought and modified men's views of Church 
 teaching; while, on the physical side, the 
 discovery of the Western world — the voyages 
 of Columbus (1492) and Sebastian Cabot 
 (1497, 1499, 1526), of Vasco da Gama to 
 India by the Cape of Good Hope (1497-1498), 
 and of Vespucci over the Atlantic (1499), 
 with the later expeditions of Drake and 
 Hawkins — enlarged men's horizons, widened 
 their national sympathies, enriched their 
 purses. Physical science, which can hardly 
 exist till thought has advanced far enough to 
 provide it with a starting-point, was the last 
 branch of knowledge to develop. It was not 
 the least. The upheaval produced by Coper- 
 nicus when (1507) he proclaimed that the 
 earth was not the centre of the universe, but 
 only one of many planets revolving round the 
 sun, was perhaps the greatest blow that intel- 
 lect dealt to orthodoxy — an assault followed 
 up by Galileo (1564-1642) and his famous 
 Pur si muove. Harvey's discovery, rather 
 later, of the circulation of the blood, and the 
 
16 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 rise in the sixteenth century of such a school 
 of doctors and surgeons as that of Kop and 
 Par6, put an end to the universal prevalence 
 of empirical methods in medicine. All these 
 men, setting out in small vessels on the high 
 seas of knowledge, were as much explorers 
 as any Drake or Hawkins who sailed, big 
 with hope, for El Dorado. 
 
 But the Renaissance could never have been 
 the true Renaissance, the spread of know- 
 ledge among the many, had not this in- 
 tellectual enthusiasm arisen at the same time 
 as a^ means of diffusing it. It almost seems, 
 indeed, as if the enthusiasm itself produced 
 the invention of printing, as a strong current 
 forces a passage. In a day when the dis- 
 semination of literature depended on copyists 
 of manuscripts, even though there were 
 hundreds of them, ideas were bound to remain 
 in the possession of the few. The printing 
 press of Gutenberg — the inventor of the art — 
 in partnership with Fust or Faustus, set up 
 in Mayence (1450); that of William Caxton 
 in London (1474); the great Aldine Press in 
 Venice (1494), which first published books 
 under folio size^in itself an inestimable 
 service— and the House of Plantin in Antwerp 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 (1549), began a new era for the world. 
 Whoever has been over the House of Plantin, 
 with its simple Renaissance front, its spacious 
 rooms — a perfect hostelry for learning — its 
 garnered memories of furred and black- 
 robed scholars and printing-presses ever at 
 work, and gold-tooled brown leather folios, 
 has gained some notion of the patient know- 
 ledge, the fine taste and criticism which went 
 to make the printers of those days; and 
 whoever has seen or read descriptions of the 
 Aldine editions of the Greek classics will 
 realize that Aldus Manutius was a genius. 
 They will understand how great was his 
 contribution to knowledge at a time when he 
 had often no more than a single manuscripc, 
 badly defaced, from which to reconstruct his 
 version; when, in any case, a choice of 
 readings of these garbled documents meant 
 an act of daring; when the very fact of 
 publication meant a lifelong devotion. The 
 printing of books in those days was in itself 
 expression, perfect in each part, from the 
 text and paper to the binding — a noble art 
 which ranked with the highest. And it was 
 the same when, as speedily happened, books 
 grew cheaper and more numerous, when the 
 
18 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Aldine press sold them at what amounted to 
 a shilHng or half-crown in our currency. 
 Printing remained the source of irrigation 
 which fertilized the world of intelligence. 
 
 It is always an interesting question whether 
 men produce movements or movements men. 
 The answers may be equally true. Every 
 great movement is heralded by forerunners, 
 each following each, each often influenced 
 by each, till the single figures mass into groups 
 first, later into throngs, and what was ex- 
 ceptional is universal. Men make move- 
 ments, and then it would seem that the move- 
 ment, once created, makes the men. For 
 with the general need there spring up the 
 people to fulfil it, one, magnet-like, drawing 
 others. 
 
 The Renaissance had many forerunners, 
 growing, indeed, so frequent between 1300 and 
 1400 that some historians prefer to date its 
 rise earlier by a century than we have done. 
 But even long before that there were prophetic 
 messages. There were, to begin with, all the 
 heretics : the Breton Abelard (1079-1142), the 
 foe of the Schoolmen ; and their other enemy, 
 the Arabian, Averroes (1120-1198), who tried 
 to restore the true text of Aristotle, so 
 
INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 mutilated by theologians; and his great 
 patron, Frederick II, the arch-heretic, the 
 friend of heretics and of artists, who initiated 
 a brief and premature Renaissance at his 
 court in Sicily. After his day the names 
 come more quickly, first in literature and the 
 arts, and afterwards in thought. The Divina 
 Commedia of Dante (1265-1321) revealed 
 behind its mediaeval theology the mind of an 
 individual cut after no pattern; and in that 
 colossal work and in the Vita Nuova he built 
 up the national language — always the first 
 step towards emancipation. Cimabue (1240- 
 c. 1302) and Giotto (1266 or 1276-1336) in 
 painting, and Niccolo Pisano in sculpture, no 
 less than Dante, burst the bonds of tradition 
 and replaced monastic symbolism by Nature. 
 They were followed throughout the fourteenth 
 century by an unbroken dynasty — by Orcagna, 
 and Simone Memmi, and Spinello Aretino, 
 and by Niccolo's successor, Giovanni Pisano; 
 while the Van Eycks' great picture, " The 
 Adoration of the Lamb," was begun before 
 1400. In thought, St. Francis (1182-1226) 
 wandered as wide as Wycliffe (1324-1384) 
 from the beaten track, each, in his way, 
 obeying natural instinct ; and later the 
 
20 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Franciscan friar and born freethinker, Roger 
 Bacon (1214-1292), turning his mind to 
 physical science, made discoveries several 
 centuries too early and was imprisoned by 
 Franciscan monks for having done so. Litera- 
 ture was a safer field, and literature did not 
 lie fallow after Dante. 
 
 He was succeeded by Petrarch (1304-1374) 
 and Boccaccio (1313-1375), two complete 
 men of the Renaissance before their time : 
 Petrarch, almost the first collector, and the 
 loving student of Latin manuscripts, the 
 Christian who adored the pagan thinkers, who 
 said he stood between Augustine and Virgil 
 (the fragmentary Virgil of those days, for 
 no complete Virgil saw light till 1469); 
 Boccaccio, the frank child of beauty and the 
 senses, whose starry meadows and green- 
 robed, myrtle- wreathed ladies foreshadow the 
 painters to come; whose vivid, marvellous 
 prose continued the work of Dante and helped 
 to mould the mother-tongue. 
 
 " What life dost thou live? " says Petrarch 
 in his Imaginary Letter to Virgil, "... how 
 near the truth were thy earthly dreams and 
 imaginings? Hast thou been welcomed by 
 the wandering ^Eneas, and hast thou passed 
 
INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 by the ivory portal? . . . Or, rather, dost 
 thou dwell in that quiet region of heaven 
 which receives the blessed, where the stars 
 shine benignly upon the peaceful shades of 
 the famous? Wert thou received thither 
 after the conquest of the Stygian abodes — • 
 on the arrival of that Highest King who, 
 victorious in the great struggle, crossed the 
 unholy threshold with pierced feet, and, 
 irresistible, beat down the unyielding bars of 
 hell with His pierced hands, and hurled its 
 gates from their . . . hinges." 
 
 In this passage the Renaissance was born 
 — ^with its passionate feeling for the past, its 
 determination to reconcile the old gods with 
 Christianity. 
 
 And while Petrarch was writing thus, 
 Chaucer (1328-1400) was singing in England, 
 running tilt against asceticism and hypocrisy, 
 striking blows for the " trouthe " that " shal 
 delivere " ; and Langland was giving us 
 Piers Plowman, with its cry for sincerity and 
 equality. 
 
 After the dawn came the day. Its first 
 glory passed quickly, its noon and evening 
 brought about unexpected results. The Re- 
 naissance began with an almost fanatical 
 
22 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 revival of classical learning; it ended in 
 anti-classicism and the triumph of the 
 Romantic Movement. It opened with Poggio 
 and Lorenzo Valla, it closed with Shake- 
 speare. For while it was worshipping antique 
 forms, it bore within itself a new life which 
 was pushing towards birth; it involved 
 paradoxes of which it was unconscious. The 
 embracing of Paganisin meant the reassertion 
 of Nature; the reawakening of art and 
 learning, a revived sense of beauty and 
 enjoyment. And enjoyment, which is vitality, 
 can bear no bonds; it is spontaneous, it 
 must make its own laws and live. It must 
 live in the present, not in the past. By 1600, 
 the world was on the side of Shakespeare. 
 
 Every nation played its part in the Re- 
 naissance, but Italy came first of all. Italy 
 was the well-spring from which the other 
 countries drew life. That life was the enduring 
 fruit of conquest which the French invaders, 
 Charles VIII, Louis XII, Francis I, carried 
 back to France between 1494 and 1515. 
 Germany and England caught the same 
 inspiration from the same source. And in 
 each land, shaped by its own qualities, the 
 Renaissance took a particular form. Rabelais 
 
INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 tells how, when the seekers after the Temple 
 of Bacbuc at last reached the shrine and 
 entered, the wine that the priestess gave them, 
 though it came from the same fountain, tasted 
 different in the mouth of every man. So it was 
 with the subtle wine of the Renaissance. 
 
 In Italy the movement was practically 
 over by 1500. In the other countries, where 
 1450 still found it in its infancy, it did not 
 prevail till the end of the century, nor did 
 it die till 1600. In France and in England, 
 indeed, its full life was not lived till 1540 and 
 onwards. But, whatever its dates, its fall 
 was much the same everywhere. It killed 
 itself. The weak element of the movement, 
 for long kept under by its force, was emotional- 
 ism; and as its force declined there was 
 nothing to counterbalance this weakness, which 
 degenerated into pedantic sentimentality. 
 The Renaissance had a sense of beauty, a 
 conviction of man's power, of his dignity; 
 it had no conscience, no rudder to steer by. 
 And yet it has bequeathed to us a noble 
 heritage. Before it ended, what was endur- 
 ing in it had already passed into common 
 existence — ^its championship of Nature, its 
 rehabilitation of joy in life. 
 
24 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 In Autumn, when all seems most mortal, 
 the dying leaves make the mould from which 
 the flowers will grow the next Spring ; and in 
 the decay of the Renaissance was hidden the 
 secret of the future — the rich seed of modern 
 thought. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MEDIGI IN FLORENCE 
 1434-1492 
 
 I. The Renaissance in Florence 
 
 It was not only in different countries that 
 
 the Renaissance took different forms. In 
 
 Italy every great town or province had in 
 
 a measure its own Renaissance. Romans, 
 
 Tuscans, Umbrians, Venetians, Sienese, the 
 
 Schools of Naples, Mantua, Ferrara, could 
 
 each show an art distinct from the rest. 
 
 Rome was, as behoved the capital of the 
 
 West, the meeting point of all the arts; it 
 
 collected, it excavated, it criticized ; possessing 
 
 no creative gift of its own, it developed 
 
 the Renaissance of the amateur; Florence, 
 
 divided between intellect and religion, linking 
 
 them together through beauty, sublimated 
 
 the senses and, at once natural and ideal, gave 
 
 us Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli ; Umbria, in a 
 
 varying form, fulfilled much the same purpose, 
 
 26 
 
26 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 with something more of intellect; Mantua 
 and Ferrara were still more elaborately 
 intellectual; Venice and Naples were pagan, 
 splendid, of the earth; Siena was purely 
 mystic, symbolic, almost consciously archaic. 
 What, amid all this variety, was the bond 
 which made the many Renaissances of all 
 the states and towns and nations into one? 
 There was obviously the search after beauty, 
 but there was a far deeper quest of which 
 this was but the part : there was the search 
 after unity — ^the central truth of all these 
 movements and one which made their best 
 days what they were. 
 
 The great men of the prime of the Re- 
 naissance were reconcilers. They sought for 
 knowledge as if it were the philosopher's stone, 
 but solely on condition that thought should 
 be made one with Christianity. Petrarch's 
 position between Augustine and Virgil only 
 heralded that of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) 
 who spent a great part of his life in har- 
 monizing Christ and Plato — and these strivers 
 were types of all cultivated people. " Much 
 noted for the sanctity of his life and for being 
 learned in Greek and Latin " is a phrase which, 
 in the biography of the day, served as a 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 27 
 
 common passport to reputation. Saints and 
 pagan gods, the Virgin and Aphrodite, were 
 placed indiscriminately together; Cato and 
 David were put into the same rank in 
 heaven. Law, science, medicine, mathe- 
 matics, each man thought he could master 
 them all, and that all religions, all branches 
 of knowledge, were one. This vision even 
 affected conquerors and their lust of posses- 
 sion. The French King, Francis I, dreamed 
 of universal Empire, and of joining East and 
 West. Men saw that intellect which led you 
 where it would was the natural enemy of the 
 pale Galilean ; they desired neither of the two 
 to conquer; they wanted reconciliation, not 
 victory, and they set to work to discover the 
 link between hostile forces. That link they 
 found, or thought they found, in beauty. 
 
 Had this ideal been practicable, the Re- 
 formation, as a new religion, a cause of 
 insuperable division between reason and 
 authority, need, perhaps, never have existed, 
 Luther and his comrades, proclaiming as 
 they did the rights of natural instinct, were 
 quite in the spirit of the Revival, and it 
 seems as if at one moment the Renaissance 
 and the Reformation might have gone hand 
 
28 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 in hand. But the passion for classicism then 
 reigning had to be reckoned with. It was 
 a pagan passion, irreconcilable either with a 
 spiritual outlook or with strong religious 
 conviction. And the great blunder of the 
 new movement was to plant this classicism — 
 the most polished and sophisticated art — in 
 a soil where it could not grow, the soil of 
 raw and truculent Nature reasserting long 
 sequestered rights. The good in one and 
 the other was unable to make common cause, 
 and withered; like found like, and primeval 
 licence fusing with the licence of satiety ended 
 in a corrupt materialism, a materialism so 
 wholly inimical to the interests of religion 
 that any alliance between the two was im- 
 possible. Luther with his direct vision saw 
 as much, and made for conquest not for 
 peace. But had this not been so, who knows 
 if Erasmus might not have won the day? 
 
 Florence from 1400 till the last decade of 
 the century may be taken as the central 
 hearth of this faith in unity, in the ultimate 
 harmony of clashing elements — Cosimo de' 
 Medici and his grandson, Lorenzo (1449-- 
 1492), as representatives of this ideal. After 
 that reigned Savonarola, a living protest 
 
PENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 29 
 
 against it, an iconoclast with regard to all 
 that it involved ; and the shattered fragments 
 were never pieced together again. When 
 Cosimo, the sumptuous banker, defeated the 
 Albizzi and, after two years of exile, came 
 into power and became the popular head of 
 a Republic (1434), the new movement was 
 still at the spring. The Medici were true 
 princely democrats, born organizers, born 
 patrons, not too common a combination. 
 Cosimo suited the world he lived in, and that 
 world, in so far as art was concerned, was one 
 in which new vistas were always opening. 
 The young art was, indeed, rapidly grow- 
 ing towaxds maturity; the old and highly 
 perfected art of Byzantine tradition was 
 played out. Its once living emblems were 
 becoming formulae, ill-suited to current needs. 
 Duccio di Buoninsegna (1285-1320) was the 
 last representative of their majesty. When 
 Giotto and Niccolo Pisano reasserted in 
 painting and in sculpture the truth of Nature 
 as against the truth of convention — the 
 claims of men and things as they were, as 
 against the claim of symbols ; when they and 
 their followers, Memmi and Orcagna and 
 Spinello, with the uncle, Andrea, and the 
 
80 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 greater nephew, Giovanni Pisano, had the 
 instinct to leave the known forms, the genius 
 to try to see for the first time, they still uncon- 
 sciously kept some traces of Byzantine style. 
 A certain stiffness in their work, a general- 
 izing quality, came to some degree from 
 inevitable technical difficulties ; but as much, 
 or more, these were the involuntary heritage 
 from the past. By 1400, however, such 
 archaisms had practically disappeared. With 
 miraculous rapidity the new art sprang up 
 almost full-grown. Masaccio, who died, a 
 fully ripened master, at twenty-seven, had 
 painted on the walls of the Carmine Chapel 
 scenes from Genesis and the Lile of St. 
 Peter, as rich in modelling as in power of 
 dramatic narrative. He had but followed 
 in the footsteps of his master and colleague 
 Masolino (1383-1440 ?) and of Paolo Uccello 
 (1397-1476), whose green frescoes of Noah's 
 adventures in the cloisters of Sta. Maria 
 Novella show his genius for grafting serene 
 classical form upon the live reality of 
 Florentine life ; while his potent battle-pieces, 
 the first of their kind, with horses rearing 
 beneath jewelled trappings and gleaming 
 condottieri, solve problems of perspective 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 31 
 
 and foreshortening hitherto unattempted. 
 And, secluded in the Monastery of San Marco, 
 Fra Angelico (1387-1455) was trying to bring 
 heaven to earth, and technique into heaven, 
 with colours that were as clear as his in- 
 spiration. 
 
 In sculpture, meanwhile, Donatello had 
 made the same revelation. Putting behind 
 him the tangle of mediaeval tradition, its 
 mingled naivete and subtlety, its dogma, 
 its mythology, Donatello (1386-1466) went 
 straight with his mighty chisel to original 
 sources — to youth and manhood, and the 
 love of living, above all, to the life of children 
 — and gave us a world of marble and bronze 
 at once real and ideal; or, rather, showed us 
 the ideal in the real, alive with the very 
 breath of creation. More than any man, 
 perhaps, since the days of Greece, has he 
 contrived to render movement and to stamp 
 it with a final tranquillity: whether tragic 
 movement, as in his Crucifixions and De- 
 positions, or the dance, as in his Cantoria, 
 where his children, their robes blown and 
 tossed by some vital energy from within, leap 
 and circle and chase one another like waves 
 on a sunamer morning. His ally and disciple, 
 
82 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Michelozzo (1391-1472), was, with a style 
 and genius all his own, making for the same 
 ends; and nearer still to Donatello was 
 Luea della Robbia (1399-1482), whose marbles 
 and terra-cottas showed a grace and majesty 
 later rather hidden by the attractions of 
 his coloured glazing. In architecture, too, 
 Michelozzo and the famous Brunelleschi (1379- 
 1440), the designer of the Dome of the Cathe- 
 dral, initiated the new development in archi- 
 tecture, the free application of the antique 
 to modern uses, the formation of a native 
 style; and the.? mantle fell upon Alberti 
 (1405-1472), who went on beyond them. 
 While in the sculpture of reliefs, Ghiberti 
 (1378-1455), the author of the two great 
 Baptistery doors and of the font in the 
 Duomo at Siena, worked magic in bronze 
 and gold and silver. 
 
 It was small wonder that art was so vital. 
 It was fed in Florence by every common 
 sight in the streets, by every civic custom 
 and institution, first and foremost by those 
 of the Guilds ; and, in its turn, it gave back 
 with interest what it received. The Guilds 
 stood for more than picturesqueness. Each, 
 under the protection of its patron saint. 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 83 
 
 acted not only as a trade-union, but as a 
 corporation for conduct. They associated 
 commerce and religion and supported the 
 treaty by laws so stringent that we wonder 
 how any apprentice submitted to them. 
 Artists and sculptors were only craftsmen 
 like any others, and the standard of work was 
 so high that the distinction between skilled 
 and unskilled workmen would have scandal- 
 ized them. If a wool-stapler or a butcher 
 gave his customers the smallest fraction of 
 underweight, if artists used inferior material, 
 or wood that would warp, the penalties were 
 inevitable. No Mosaic Dispensation could 
 be severer. But the Florentine Dispensation 
 was as merry as it was strict. ' There were 
 festas on every saint's-day, there were dances 
 and masques and snowball-battles; each 
 Guild had its o^vn pageants, and there was 
 a natural equality between masters and men 
 that fostered a real living gaiety linking each 
 to all, so that pleasure was a bond, instead 
 of a division, between the classes. 
 
 Giotto's Campanile, Giovanni Pisano's 
 Fountain, were a kind of sculptured primer 
 of ethics in which Florence and Perugia 
 
 wrote lessons for their citizens ; the medallions 
 o 
 
34 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of the Virtues, of the Seasons with all their 
 occupations, and of the Arts and Sciences; 
 of Grammar, no mere dry-nurse, but a mother 
 with her child at her knee, and of Philosophy 
 pouring his wisdom into the ears of eager 
 boys, were visible to every loiterer in the 
 public places — part of the life of the people, 
 of that wonderful general intelligence which 
 then so permeated the air that it is difficult 
 to say whether it was cause or effect. 
 
 In spite of all our books and pictures, it 
 is not easy to rebuild the Florence of 1435- 
 1440. The Medici lived in the Riccardi 
 Palace; the Palazzo Vecchio designed by 
 Arnolfo Cambio (1232-1300) which they after- 
 wards inhabited was, and continued till 1532 
 to be, the seat of the Signoria; the Bargeilo 
 was that of the chief Magistrate, or Podesta. 
 The Duomo, its white marble rather too 
 dazzling, perhaps, against its black stripes, 
 was only consecrated in 1486; Ghiberti's 
 doors, all glorious without, had been partly 
 set up by 1424, though the last was not fully 
 ready for another eight-and-twenty years. 
 San Lorenzo, planned by Brunelleschi, the 
 nearest church to the palace of the Medici, 
 had been built by 1425. The rough stronghold 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 35 
 
 of Sta. Croce, begun almost a century and 
 a half back by Cambio, was still unfinished; 
 and Sta. Maria Novella, completed inside 
 since 1350, yet lacked the resplendent upper 
 fa9ade added later by the hand of Alberti. 
 Or San Michele — the handiwork of Orcagna — 
 with its granary above the church, stood, 
 as it stands at present, and held within it 
 the wonder of the age — that great sculptor's 
 marble shrine, carved with the story of the 
 Virgin and with the Virgin's attendant guard 
 of Virtues, Apostles, Saints and Angels. 
 And across the way, then as now, rose the 
 Arte della Lana, the Woolstaplers' Hall, with 
 its stone emblem of a fleecy lamb above the 
 doorway. Close by, too, the chaffering 
 Mercato was held in the wide Piazza, now the 
 Square of Vittore Emmanuele and the pride 
 of a blatant civilization. In those days it 
 was the centre of the life of Florence. All 
 round it were huddled and piled — leaning, 
 squinting, swarming, jutting out into the 
 street — booths and gables, balconies and 
 windows, bottegas and houses, the poorer sort 
 hung with flowers, or bright rags drying in 
 the sun, the better, with blazoned or carved 
 devices. At one end was the famous cook- 
 
36 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 shop, still standing within the last fifty years, 
 where all the painters and craftsmen went 
 to get their dinner. There Squarcione, gold- 
 smith and painter, one day to be Verocchio's 
 master, stood side by side with Filippo Lippi 
 and talked of the skill of Fra Angelico's 
 young pupil, the lad, Benozzo Gozzoli ; while 
 Rossellino and Andrea della Robbia dis- 
 cussed with gesticulating thumbs the merits 
 of marble and terra-cotta, and Andrea's last 
 effect in glazing. His uncle, Luca, could 
 not leave his Cantoria — his wide-browed 
 singing maidens, and his boys with pipes 
 and tabors — the pendant work to that of 
 Donatello for the Duomo, the pendant and 
 the rival. Who knew if he, Luca, might not 
 even excel him, though he was the greatest 
 master in the world? And in their midst 
 stood the artist who regarded himself as the 
 greatest of all, the famous cook, their host, 
 ladling out to' each his portion of minestra 
 steaming from the pot. All was shifting 
 colour and movement and noise — purposeful 
 noise and movement — nor did the din flag 
 unless it were when a street singer, perhaps 
 the popular " Rhyming Barber," Burchiello, 
 came in acclaimed by a nickname, in striped 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 87 
 
 jerkin and breeches, his cithern slung round 
 his neck, and sang some of the Tuscan Beone, 
 the drinking-songs; or else city songs, or 
 May-day songs, or the age-old Ballate, the 
 dance-measures of the country-side set to 
 trenchant stories in rhyme. Everyone, cook 
 and all, would join the chorus; some, after 
 their stoup of good red wine, would dance, 
 and there were jokes and there were kisses — 
 for the flower-girls came in from the Campagna 
 with fresh roses and sweet herbs for the mouth ; 
 and then, as the great bell boomed the hour, 
 back to work through the blue and golden 
 blaze of the square, with zest and no repining, 
 for love-making was but an episode, and 
 work was the background of life, interwoven 
 with every part of it. 
 
 Meanwhile you might meet the great 
 Cosimo, Pater Patrice, crossing the sallow 
 waters of the Arno by the crowded Ponte 
 Vecchio, on foot most likely, homely and 
 magnificent, in golden tissue and violet; his 
 jewelled chain with its pendant medal, designed 
 by Pisanello, round his neck, a pearl from the 
 East in his cap, his hand laid on the shoulder 
 of his companion, the Greek philosopher, 
 Agyropulos, his retinue behind him. Now 
 
38 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and again he stops to look at some bauble, 
 perhaps to buy it, on the booths along the 
 bridge, and to put a pertinent question to 
 the craftsman who sells it ; or to converse with 
 the contadini who have carried in their flat 
 fruit-laden baskets from the country, and to 
 find out all he can of their manner of sowing 
 and planting. But artists he loves better 
 than gardeners, and sculptors best, he owns, 
 among artists. He is now on his way to the 
 Bottega of Donatello, his " molto amico,^^ to 
 watch the progress of the bronze doors that 
 he commissioned him to make for the Sacristy 
 of San Lorenzo. Nothing is too good for this 
 his favourite artist. . The Bank of the Medici 
 has been ordered to give him a weekly sum 
 that will suffice for him and for four under- 
 lings. And " because this Donatello did not 
 go clad as the said Cosimo would have wished, 
 he gave him a rose-coloured cloak and a hood, 
 and another garment below the cloak, and 
 thus he thought to clothe him anew from top 
 to toe. And one feast-day morning he sent 
 these clothes to him that he might wear 
 them." Donatello appeared in them once or 
 twice, but after that " he would no longer 
 put them on, for that, said he, they seemed 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 39 
 
 too delicate in his eyes." If Cosimo desired 
 strenuous men to have luxury, he knew how 
 to refuse it to those who were not. When 
 a certain Era Roberto from Milan, once a 
 frugal and pious friar, but spoilt by the great 
 Duke, Francesco Sforza, came to visit him 
 in Florence in a robe of rich Flemish cloth, 
 Cosimo begged him to sit down by his side 
 and took it between finger and thumb. 
 "Is not this very rich?" said he. "Duke 
 Francesco gave it me," answered the friar. 
 " I did not ask you who gave it you — I asked 
 if it were not very rich," said Cosimo again. 
 There was silence. The court looked on 
 from a distance. Then Roberto whispered 
 in his ear a petition for two hundred ducats. 
 Cosimo had never yet denied any of his 
 requests, but now he whispered back a refusal, 
 and at the same time his sorrow for the change 
 that caused his reply. " And all of this he 
 told with such courteous consideration that 
 no man present could hear it." 
 
 Gracious, shrewd and merry was Cosimo, 
 simple of heart and manners and high of 
 soul, with a fervent taste for discussion. 
 What he enjoyed was talking of Immortality 
 with men wiser than himself, more particularly 
 
40 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 with Agyropulos. " He made more deeds 
 than he made words. . . . His answers were 
 short and sometimes dark, so that men might 
 take them in divers senses. And he had an 
 everlasting memory. Also he knew men at 
 once when he looked into their eyes." So 
 writes his intimate, Vespasiano. If he was 
 as cruel as his compeers — and he could be 
 terribly cruel — he was generous even in a 
 generous age and as great a forgiver as an 
 avenger. He gave without limits, and with 
 delicacy. Scholars, holy men, needy envoys, 
 were alike bidden to draw as they willed upon 
 his Bank. And, unlike most potentates, he 
 respected independence and scorned the con- 
 venient current fashion of rewarding service 
 by posts about his court. He preferred to 
 give houses or freehold farms. No less had 
 he the art of the higher generosity. Petti- 
 ness was far from him. " There is," he used 
 to say, " a weed the which grows in many 
 places. Men," quoth he, " should not nurture 
 it but let it wither up, yet the most give it 
 careful fostering . . . and the weed is that 
 most evil plant called envy." Envy, indeed, 
 bred gloom, and gloom was his bugbear. 
 Grumblers, men with grievances, he regarded 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 41 
 
 as his foes. He kept his most " salted " 
 retorts (and his talk is recorded as always 
 salted, even when he pardoned) for rich men 
 who groaned over their possessions and 
 other like croakers. One such he practically 
 banished, bidding him go and live at his 
 country estate, since his absence from it had, 
 he gathered, caused the outrages so tediously 
 c^jmplained of. Yet outrages against himself, 
 if they were not conspiracies, he could pass 
 by; he would dismiss a cheat, a thief, with 
 a shrewd joke, whatever the sum of which 
 he had been defrauded, but then the man 
 whom Cosimo dismissed was not likely to be 
 employed by any other. 
 
 A nature like his implied a big intellect. 
 He was a keen reader of history and philo- 
 sophy, he loved the sport of debate, and he 
 always took the side of the weakest, whatever 
 his own opinion. And then suddenly he 
 would throw thought aside and go off to 
 garden at his spacious Villa of Careggi. 
 
 Such was Cosimo, a type of early Renais- 
 sance manners and morals — of regal common- 
 sense, of simple piety and simple cruelty, of 
 splendour and of soberness. His conscience 
 was a Renaissance conscience, at once in- 
 
42 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 delicate and scrupulous. When Pope Eugenius 
 IV was in Florence (1430) Cosimo confessed 
 to him that a sum of ill-gotten money was 
 weighing upon his mind and asked how he 
 could best repair his offence. Eugenius lost 
 no time in recommending him to rebuild the 
 Monastery of San Marco, then insufficient 
 for the needs of the monks. Cosimo obeyed ; 
 he maintained them there; and — finest giit 
 of all — he gave to the monastery the library 
 which afterwards grew so famous. It became 
 his hobby. For this he bought priceless 
 manuscripts and consulted bibliophiles and 
 scholars. 
 
 Florence was indeed at this moment the 
 centre of great men of learning. There were 
 others who worked in Venice, Rome and 
 Naples, notably Guarino of Verona, the 
 famous classical teacher at Venice and 
 Ferrara; but the majority preferred the 
 patronage of Cosimo. They abounded in 
 the first half of the fifteenth century, like an 
 army of engineers, cutting the way over ice 
 and snow for the Renaissance to pass over. 
 But they began, as we have seen, in Petrarch's 
 day, and increased towards the close of the 
 fourteenth century. Such men as the Greek 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 43 
 
 grammarian, Chrysoloras, who lectured at 
 Florence from 1397-1400, and his compatriot, 
 Aurispa, the seeker after manuscripts, who 
 first found texts of Sophocles and ^Eschylus, 
 or the noble patron-connoisseur, Niccolo do 
 Nicoli (d. 1437) to whom Aurispa brought 
 his treasure-trove, were but the advance- 
 guard. Cosimo beheld the prime of the 
 Humanists, those disseminators of knowledge 
 and enlightenment, the real exterminators 
 of the Middle Ages. Only few among the 
 many can be mentioned, whether of the in- 
 trepid band who searched monastic libraries 
 for manuscripts at home and abroad, or of 
 those who toiled in their studies. There was 
 Poggio Bracciolini who did both, carrying 
 off precious loot from Switzerland and 
 Germany, and writing — and quarrelling — in 
 copious Latin. Greater than he was Lorenzo 
 Valla, the high-priest of Latinity, who main- 
 tained the rights of Latin as a literary language 
 adapted to all purposes; the critic of words 
 and ideas, who dared subject the Apostles' 
 Creed to the test of historical knowledge. 
 Or there was Leonardo Bruni who translated 
 into Latin a considerable part of Aristotle 
 and Plato ; or FileLfo, fresh from his visit to 
 
44 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Constantinople and one of the first Professors 
 of Greek at *the University of Florence. 
 And there was the influential circle of the 
 Greeks themselves — Lascaris, the Lecturer, 
 and Agyropulos, and Gemistos Plethon, the 
 Mystic, to whom in great measure Florence 
 owed the Platonic Academy. 
 
 His presence in the city was the result of 
 the Council of 1438, originally convened at 
 Ferrara and transferred a year later to 
 Florence, and this Council, in organizing 
 which Cosimo had been largely instrumental, 
 was one of the most representative events of 
 his reign. 
 
 For it. made conspicuously for unity, 
 summoned as it was for the purpose of re- 
 conciling the Eastern and Western Churches, 
 Greeks and Armenians, with Rome. What- 
 ever the political ends it had in view, and they 
 were obvious, it also aimed at tolerance and 
 harmony, at a vision of the truth men held 
 in common rather than of the badges that 
 divided them. In its pictures queness, too, 
 it was essentially of the Renaissance — a 
 gathering of the nations and the Doctors of 
 all colours and complexions. It met in 
 Sta. Maria Novella. Pope Eugenius IV and the 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 45 
 
 Patriarch of Constantinople sat throned side 
 by side, the Pope, great of mind and stature, 
 so noble in aspect, says a witness, that it 
 made the crowd weep to look on him ; both 
 of them surrounded by, a throng of Greek 
 Doctors robed in ancient vestments " full of 
 gravity," in strong contrast to the gold and 
 white and scarlet of the hierarchies of Rome. 
 This parliament of prelates came to nought 
 as far as its main purpose was concerned. 
 East and West separated once more; but 
 the aspiration to unite had been there and 
 had put itself into the atmosphere, and, 
 what was practically more important, a 
 group of learned Greeks remained behind to 
 spread fresh zeal for their language and their 
 literature. 
 
 From this root sprang an ever-spreading 
 enthusiasm for Plato and for a wider know- 
 ledge of his writings. The Platonic philo- 
 sophy, so nearly akin to poetry, was a medium 
 admirably suited to the work of reconciliation 
 between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Aiming 
 as it does at weaving all things that show good 
 into one indivisible tissue, it easily became a 
 pliable instrument for the latest doctrines, 
 and a great deal was read into it that was not 
 
46 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 originally put there. The Church laid no 
 ban upon Plato. Hence it did not seem 
 incongruous that the pious parish priest, 
 Marsilio Ficino, should keep a lamp always 
 burning before his bust, and give him as 
 passionate a love as any living disciple to 
 a living master. He devoted his life to what 
 had hitherto been unattempted, a complete 
 translation of his works. And in this his 
 main motive was not scholarship, but an 
 ardent desire to prove the agreement of 
 Plato's teaching with that of Christ. If it 
 was at Gemistos Plethon's instigation, it was 
 also largely owing to Ficino 's influence that 
 Cosimo founded the Academe. This society 
 met in the Badia (a church built by himself) 
 to discuss points raised by the Neo -Platonic 
 creed, and here they liked to talk from noon 
 till evening upon love and the soul, or the 
 commonwealth, as the case might be. 
 
 For Plato's ideals doubtless penetrated 
 politics as well as thought, and affected the 
 intellectual democracy which distinguished 
 the administration of Florence. 
 . Cosimo tried to make the science of Govern- 
 ment one with art as well as thought. On 
 the walls of Courts of Justice and of Council- 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 47 
 
 rooms he sought to immortalize the virtues, 
 the abstract sentiments which should guide 
 the State. He was not original in this, as the 
 frescoed figures of Good and Bad Government 
 in Siena's Palazzo Publico can testify. But 
 he was keen to express political truths in 
 terms of beauty, and to turn public buildings 
 into lesson-books for the people. • ;•' 
 
 His death was in itself an example of the 
 unity he sought; it was one with his life. 
 Some time before his last illness he seemed 
 to have a presentiment that the end was 
 approaching, and his wife noticed that he 
 would often " stand motionless for hours . . . 
 wrapt in thought." Once she asked him the 
 reason. " Wlien thou art about to go to thy 
 country villa," said he, " it taketh a full 
 fortnight of worries to order thy going. 
 And I who have to depart from this life 
 and travel to that other, dost thou not think 
 that I, too, must consider ? " He made his 
 preparations in the fashion of his time, seek- 
 ing help not in books of devotion, but in 
 Aristotle's Ethics and in Plato. When he 
 lay dying, he asked Ficino to read out his 
 new translation of Plato. Marsilio sat at his 
 bedside now reading, now talking of the 
 
48 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 " Only Good," the same beyond Life as it is 
 here. . So, having " considered " his depar- 
 ture, he set out on his last voyage in great 
 calm. 
 
 The field, however, in which the quest for 
 Unity had freest scope was the field of a more 
 regular education. Never, perhaps, were 
 ampler opportunities given for wide culture. 
 Mature students were provided with lec- 
 tures — on Plato, on Dante, on the ancient 
 languages : lectures at which earnest, grey- 
 bearded learners sat side by side on a bench 
 with striplings. But it is the schemes for the 
 bringing-up of children which best prove 
 the real enthusiasm for breadth and many- 
 sidedness, for the use of numerous paths 
 converging in one centre. 
 
 France in the eighteenth century could 
 not produce so many or such various schemes 
 of education as did Italy in the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth. Now, as then, an initiator of 
 genius gave life to all these projects, whether 
 those of contemporaries or of followers. The 
 Rousseau of the Renaissance was Vittorino 
 Raimboldini, better known as Vittorino da 
 Feltre (1378-1446), the inspirer of educa- 
 tionists throughout the nations — ^to some 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 49 
 
 degree of Rousseau himself, since whether or 
 not Jean Jacques had read Vittorino, that 
 great Italian had revealed the value of 
 simplicity, and the mischief worked by luxury 
 in the training of the young. Rousseau had 
 but to re-discover an idea of which the world 
 had already been made conscious. And as 
 Rousseau gave rise to the schools of Genlis 
 and Edgeworth and Pestalozzi, so did 
 Vittorino begin a line of innovators in ethics 
 and in scholarship — from his famous disciples, 
 Federigo of Urbino and Lorenzo Valla, to 
 Erasmus and Colet and Rabelais in the age 
 that came after. Vittorino himself could 
 only have belonged to the earlier and purer 
 half of the fifteenth century. 
 ' " Short he was of person," says one of his 
 contemporaries, . " small and very gay, of 
 such a nature that it seemed he was always 
 laughing, yet to see him you would say he 
 was a man of great reverence. He spoke 
 little and went clad in a robe of dark stuff 
 with tails reaching down to the ground, and 
 on his head a little peaked hood." 
 
 This laughing man was a strenuous student. 
 In his poverty-stricken youth he worked his 
 way at the University of Padua by taking 
 
 D 
 
50 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 pupils; he even became footman to the 
 professor of mathematics in the hope that his 
 service might be accepted instead of the 
 payment of his fees. He was disappointed. 
 But he set to to master EucHd unaided and, 
 more generous than the professor, he taught 
 it for love. At forty-two, he went to Venice 
 and learned Greek of the great Guarino, and 
 at forty-four he formally started his system 
 of education, first at Padua, then at Venice. 
 Three years later, already a far-famed man, 
 he, the hater of courts, reluctantly accepted 
 the offer of Gian Francesco, Marquis of 
 Mantua, to come there and educate his 
 children. Thus it was that, supported by the 
 enlightened Marquis and his intellectual wife, 
 Paola Malatesta, Vittorino embarked upon 
 his biggest, most enduring enterprise, and 
 founded a kind of Utopian College, half 
 learned, half Socratic, a union of Porch and 
 Thebaid. In a house set apart, he began the 
 training of the princes and of a group of their 
 friends and contemporaries. The undesirable 
 and luxurious he weeded out, accepting none 
 that were not spiritually suitable, however 
 large the sums their parents offered; while 
 such as were poor and promising he paid for 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 51 
 
 from the fees of the wealthy. Thus roj^al 
 dukes were brought up side by side with 
 plebeian scholars — their equals, perhaps their 
 superiors, in this sincere Republic of letters. 
 Nor did Vittorino exclude girls ; he taught the 
 two little Mantuan princesses, one of whom, 
 Cecilia Gonzaga, was, at ten years old, a real 
 Greek scholar. Over all alike the master 
 exercised his sway. "The School-room," 
 he told them, " must be to them a holy 
 place," "and the house," says Vespasiano, 
 " became a sanctuary both of deeds and 
 words." 
 
 His system was pre-eminently stamped with 
 the mark of the Renaissance ; his chief quest 
 was the search after unity, his main purpose 
 to produce not a scholar but a man — a 
 complete man, developed on all sides, in 
 body and soul — self-subsisting, helpful, grace- 
 ful, brave, deeply studious. His purpose 
 was larger and more spontaneous than that 
 of his illustrious French successor; he made 
 for simplicity where Jean Jacques made for 
 simplification ; for naturalness rather than for 
 any primitive return to Nature. And this 
 Vittorino effected by plain and reasonable 
 means — by frugal diet, hard exercise and sports 
 
52 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of all kinds ; by daily walks, by talks, by hours 
 in his splendid library of manuscripts; by 
 the constant use of intellectual stimulus and 
 due attention to health in so far as it served 
 to set the mind free ; by a practice of steady 
 piety, and the remembrance that God was 
 best served by serving man. When the 
 Gonzagas came to him they were spoilt and 
 corrupted lordlings, accustomed to all the 
 luxuries and despotisms of their condition. 
 Ludovico was so fat he could hardly 
 move, Carlo correspondingly thin. Vittorino 
 diverted Ludovico from his habit of over- 
 eating at table by starting topics of such 
 interest, or music so attractive, as to make 
 him drop the tit-bit from his fork; he pro- 
 vided Carlo with a nourishing diet. Ludovico 
 turned out an excellent ruler and patron of 
 art and learning; Carlo a gifted, scholarly 
 human being. All his pupils gave him their 
 confidence and could not bear his disapproval. 
 When Carlo once used an oath at tennis 
 Vittorino, seizing him by the hair, boxed his 
 ears, and Carlo, far from resenting it, would 
 not be consoled till he gained forgiveness. 
 But the master liked praising better than 
 blaming, and had been known to weep with 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 53 
 
 joy over a good composition. He knew,' too, 
 that humility can be dignified, and, naturally 
 choleric, he bade his , elder pupils interrupt 
 him with a question if they saw him b,egin 
 to lose his temper. He wished education to 
 come from both sides and endeavoured to 
 produce a true equality. 
 
 Lessons in Greek and Latin, in literature 
 and history, began his course. Virgil, Homer, 
 Cicero, Demosthenes were read and mastered 
 in turn, followed by the pursuit of logic and 
 dialectics, rhetoric and debate, mathematics 
 and music. Throughout, his end was to 
 kindle interest and to teach the way to think, 
 to make his scholars citizens of an unseen 
 commonwealth, to give them the freedom of 
 the City of the Soul. He turned out what 
 one who knew him called " men of life as 
 well as letters," men like Federigo of Urbino, 
 to whom art, science, war and statecraft 
 were equally familiar, equally to be carried 
 out on a plane of honour as high as their 
 religion. But to effect this involved no 
 common sacrifice; it meant a life's devotion, 
 a cloistral power of self-control. Pisanello's 
 medal in honour of Vittorino, stamped with 
 the emblem of sacrifice — a pelican feeding her 
 
54 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 young from her torn breast — ^was an image 
 not far beyond the truth. 
 
 The character of Vittorino's best-known 
 disciple serves better than any commentary to 
 prove the results of his teaching. The aristo- 
 cratic commonwealth of Urbino was as much 
 his creation as that of the good Duke Federigo, 
 whose shrewd face and broken aquiline nose 
 are so well known to us through the portraits 
 of Piero della Francesca and the medals of 
 Pisanello. 
 
 Federigo, Count of Montefeltro, later Duke 
 of Urbino (1422-1482), held as sumptuous a 
 court as any in Italy. There Piero della 
 Francesca painted, and thither from Flanders 
 came Justus of Ghent, with his rich and sober 
 brush, to portray Federigo 's family. Here 
 poets and ambassadors sat at the same board, 
 and a troop of jewellers, mercers, inlayers, 
 strove to adorn both board and company. 
 Yet in spite of this magnificence, there was 
 nothing soft about Federigo 's establishment. 
 The youth of Italy " flocked to Urbino to 
 learn manners," and his household, which 
 numbered five hundred, " was governed," 
 says one of his friends, " less like a company 
 of soldiers than a strict religious community." 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 55 
 
 There was no gaming, no swearing, there was 
 merriment, there was untiring conversation. 
 At meal -times, one of his five readers read 
 aloud Livy, or Thomas Aquinas. The day 
 was a long one ; when the sun rose the Duke 
 was on horseback, and was home from his 
 morning ride just as his courtiers were getting 
 up. After Mass, he held audience in a garden 
 " open at all sides " — and the phrase sums 
 up his mind and his policy. While he dined 
 all the doors were open, so that any who 
 Hked might enter the crowded hall. He ate 
 simply and drank nothing stronger than the 
 juice of cherries or pomegranates. After 
 dinner he officiated as Judge, and then, work 
 over, he went to visit his favourite nuns of 
 Sta. Chiara, or to watch the athletic sports 
 of the young men of Urbino. The twilight 
 brought diversion and discussion, by blazing 
 fire, or in the starlit loggia, that loggia 
 which from Urbino's towered crag looks down 
 upon an ocean of blue valley. The talk often 
 turned upon the arts that Federigo loved so 
 truly — loved and understood, for " to hear 
 him converse with a sculptor, you would 
 have thought he was a master of the craft." 
 There were hours also in his world -famed 
 
56 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 library. Had it not taken fourteen years 
 to create? It contained precious copies of 
 every known Greek and Latin author, every 
 Hebrew work that was accessible, every 
 history and treatise of importance, the poets 
 old and new, a wealth of volumes on the 
 sciences and arts— each of them " writ with 
 the pen, not one of them printed, which would 
 be matter for shame " — a. shining army of 
 books bound alike, in crimson and silver. 
 When we think that all this culture, all this 
 beauty, existed in no rich Tuscan plain, but 
 had to be transported up a mountain before 
 it reached the city of the thirteen towers, we 
 shall gain some notion of the force of those 
 ideals which Vittorino da Feltre had inspired. 
 
 And there was in Italy another teacher, 
 nearly thirty years younger than Vittorino, 
 who shared many of his ideas, but transformed 
 them into art, who formed, as it were, the 
 link between the earlier Renaissance of Cosimo 
 and the later Renaissance of Lorenzo — that 
 full splendour of the noontide before the day 
 began to. wane. This was Leon Battista 
 Alberti (1405-1472), architect, builder, painter 
 musician, poet, scholar and mathematician; 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 57 
 
 student of physics, law, mechanics, astronomy, 
 medicine; the famous writer on perspective, 
 the creator of Sigismondo Malatesta's great 
 Pagan temple at Rimini. Alberti's career 
 began stormily ; his family had been banished 
 from Florence by the hostile Albizzi and 
 he himself was born and bred in exile. Yet 
 his writings, unlike those of most victims, 
 show no trace of bitterness; their note is a 
 philosophical suavity. His great work,* the 
 Trattato della Famiglia (the Treatise concern- 
 ing the Family), written for the benefit of 
 his own relations, is a kind of Tract for the 
 Times, a manifesto of a morality for the State 
 which is based upon family life. He composed 
 it in the form of a dialogue held between 
 several of the Albertis at Padua. The first 
 book deals with education from babyhood 
 onwards and with filial and parental relations ; 
 the second with marriage, and with the conduct 
 of an ideal couple towards each other and to- 
 wards the State; the third (after Xenophon) 
 with domestic economy, moral and financial; 
 the fourth with that favourite subject of the 
 Renaissance, friendship: with the good to be 
 gained from friends and the succour they give 
 to the mind of man. Each topic, in turn, is 
 
58 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 discussed with an all-embracing, concrete 
 common-sense, and the four parts of the 
 Manual make one whole; they unfold the 
 ethical and physical evolution of man as a 
 social being, from the unconscious days of 
 primitive ties to the conscious days of spiritual 
 choice. Once more there is the search after 
 unity; after the solidarity of experience and 
 of men in their diverse phases. 
 
 Alberti did more than write a noble moral 
 guide-book. He developed, he defended his 
 mother-tongue. A dead language, he averred, 
 cannot suffice for a living nation, and reluct- 
 antly leaving the niceties of his cherished 
 Latin, he used his native Tuscan and revived 
 old Tuscan literature, thus aiding national 
 growth and preparing the way for Lorenzo. 
 He did it as only an artist could, and all this 
 side of his multiform spirit is expressed in a 
 letter that he wrote to Brunelleschi when, 
 after Cosimo's return, Alberti also re-entered 
 Florence. 
 
 " When," he writes, " I came back from 
 the long exile in which the Alberti have 
 grown old, to this our mother-city, which 
 exceeds all others in the beauty of her monu- 
 ments, I perceived that many living men. 
 
RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE 59 
 
 but first of all you, Filippo, and our dearest 
 friend, the sculptor Donatello, and Lorenzo 
 Ghiberti and Luca della Robbia and Masaccio, 
 were not of less account for genius and noble 
 work than any ancient artist of great 
 fame. . . . Who is there " (he breaks 
 out) " so . . . envious as not to praise the 
 architect Filippo, at the sight of that vast 
 structure raised above the heavens, spacious 
 enough to cover with its shadow all Tuscan 
 folk? . . . This temple has in it both grace 
 and majesty. I delight to notice the union 
 of slender elegance with a full and solid 
 vigour, showing, as it does, tliat while each 
 part is made to please, the whole is built for 
 eternity." 
 
 Then he enters the great nave and adores 
 with all the fervour of one who has suffered 
 absence and its longings. " Inside these 
 aisles," he writes, " there is the climate of 
 eternal Spring — wind, frost, rime without; 
 a mild and quiet air within; the blaze of 
 summer in the square; delicious coolness 
 here. More than all things I delight in the 
 sweetness of those voices busied at the 
 Sacrifice. . . . Other modes of singing weary 
 with reiteration; only religious music never 
 
60 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 palls. . . . What human heart is so rude as 
 not to soften at the rhythmic rise and fall of 
 those voices, complete in tone, in cadences 
 so sweet and flexible ? During these mys- 
 teries, I can never listen to the Greek words 
 calling upon God for His help against our 
 wretchedness, without the tears falling from 
 my eyes." 
 
 In Alberti's speech we hear the voice of 
 the earlier Renaissance as it were confessing 
 itself — knowledge and susceptibility are made 
 one, 
 
 II. Lorenzo II Magnifico 
 
 Both these powers reached their zenith in 
 the day of Cosimo's grandson. As in the 
 early fifteenth century knowledge flowered, 
 and its blossom was called the Renaissance, 
 so in its tui'n the Renaissance flowered, and 
 its blossom was the soul of Lorenzo the 
 Magnificent. 
 
 Lorenzo inherited more than Cosimo's 
 wealth. He carried on his traditions as a 
 Patron, his reverence for scholars, his en- 
 thusiasm for artists. Il Magnifico read 
 widely, he had no touch of the pedant. He 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 61 
 
 could be as simple as Pater Patrice ; he was 
 also subtler, more poetic, more extravagant, 
 as became his day. 
 
 For Lorenzo was born in due season. He 
 was no contrast to his age, no exception. 
 He was with his contemporaries, not beyond 
 them — more themselves than they were. 
 Original, but no originator, he took the gifts 
 and powers that he found ready and adven- 
 tured them on fresh paths till they wore a 
 changed aspect. 
 
 The paths were many. Life, as we have 
 seen, was never fuller or fresher than in the 
 Florence of the Medici. Its art was the ex- 
 pression of its life, and Lorenzo, for so long 
 the leading spirit in this vital, pulsing city, 
 was, above all else, an artist, an interpreter 
 of existence. In this he was not singular. 
 There were many other artist princes of that 
 day — Sforzas, Estes, Gonzagas, Malatestas; 
 but no one else was an artist ruling over 
 artists, freely chosen by them to be their 
 ruler. And this could hardly have been but 
 for the fact that the regal position of the 
 Medici was theirs by no murderous usurpa- 
 tion or tyrannical tradition, such as prevailed 
 in the rest of Italy, but simply by their fitness 
 
62 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 for the post, proclaimed by the will of the 
 people. 
 
 Lorenzo's boyhood had been passed in 
 training for this end. Cosimo did not die 
 till he was fourteen, and exercised some sway 
 over his upbringing. But it was his father, 
 the martyr to gout, Piero II Gottoso, 
 the enduring, uncomplaining, sweet -natured 
 scholar, who planned his education. And it 
 was his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, who 
 had the greatest influence upon him. " My 
 only refuge, the only helper who could aid 
 and counsel me," he said, after he had lost 
 her. She must have been a delightful woman. 
 She was loving, she was gay, she had wits 
 and a marked turn for poetry. The mystic 
 strain in her was strong — the strain she 
 bequeathed to her son — and her verse took 
 the form of " Spiritual Songs," sung in the 
 streets of Florence by the people. Neverthe- 
 less, she was no puritan. She kept open house 
 and open heart for the poets, the friends of 
 her son and of her husband, and was indul- 
 gently kind even to the coarse -tongued Pulci, 
 whose wit might easily have offended a taste 
 less fastidious than hers. A quarrelsome set 
 of people they were, and they looked to her 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 63 
 
 to soothe their ruffled feathers. But there 
 was one of her dependents who gave her 
 nothing but pleasure: the young painter, 
 Sandro Botticelli. His spiritual imagination 
 appealed to her. She took him to live in her 
 palace and treated him almost as a son, and 
 he, impressionable, unknown, gave this great 
 lady something like adoration. The picture 
 he painted for her, the Madonna of the 
 Magnificat, now in the Uffizi, is full of personal 
 feeling. There is a tender touch in the 
 portraiture of the two boy-angels who hold 
 the book — the idealized pictures, it is said, of 
 the young Lorenzo and his brother, Giuliano, 
 She probably left a lasting stamp upon Botti- 
 celli's art. She certainly did more to form 
 her son's outlook than she knew. She helped 
 to make him one of the two most distinguished 
 Tuscan poets of his day. 
 
 Stricter educators were not wanting. There 
 was Cristoforo Landino, the professor of 
 poetry and eloquence at Florence, the famous 
 writer and lecturer upon Dante (he was only 
 rivalled by the fashionable Coello, whose 
 course of lectures on the Divina Commedia 
 filled the Duomo); there was Agyropulos; 
 there was Marsilio Ficino, chosen by Piero 
 
64 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 to teach his boy. And Marsilio was Lorenzo's 
 Mentor all his life, for Marsilio represented 
 Plato, and Plato did more even than his 
 mother to mould his mind and his affec- 
 tions. He imbibed Platonism — Renaissance 
 Platonism — with the air he breathed, and it 
 is impossible to understand him and his times 
 at all, unless we realize the part that it played 
 in his life. 
 
 Platonism had a concrete embodiment in 
 the far-famed Academe, which, since Cosimo's 
 day, had widened in scope. Sometimes its 
 Symposia* were held in the chestnut glades of 
 the Camaldulensan Convent of the Angeli, on 
 the hills of the Casentino. Or you might see 
 Lorenzo take the head of the board at the 
 yearly feast, laid in some grassy palace 
 garden, in honour of Plato's birthday. His 
 brother, Giuliano II Superbo, and Poliziano, 
 the poet, would be there, besides Marsilio, 
 and, in later years, Pico della Mirandola, 
 Plato's bust presided at table, and each 
 guest took the part of a character in his Dia- 
 logues, sustaining it all through the banquet. 
 These grave and fantastic debates made a 
 great stir in the world outside. Together 
 with all the eagerness of undergraduates the 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 65 
 
 debaters possessed the maturity of men. 
 Talk was their medium and they never tired 
 of it. Landino, in his Disputationes CamaU 
 duenses, has given us some idea of what they 
 talked about. There was one particular 
 day — ^it was in summer — when they gathered 
 together by a " bubbling spring " — Lorenzo 
 and Giuliano II Superbo, and the great 
 Alberti. To them came Marsilio with his 
 lute, and ere long they began their discourse. 
 The theme they chose was the relative merits 
 of an active and a contemplative life. Alberti 
 urged contemplation as the best means a 
 ruler could have of doing good to his fellow- 
 men ; Lorenzo vehemently opposed him. The 
 conversation glided on to other matters, to 
 Virgil and the Platonic aspects of the ^neid. 
 Platonism was a good starting-point for most 
 subjects. 
 
 In what did this attractive creed consist ? 
 There was not much of the original Plato in 
 it. Plato's tenets were poetical and elastic; 
 besides, Florentine Platonism, as a code of 
 conduct, was based upon the fanciful Neo- 
 Platonists of Alexandria. Ficino himself 
 had translated such Alexandrian works as 
 the Hermeticus and the writings of Plotinus, 
 
66 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 His method was to prove to his pupils " the 
 relation between the unity and the plurality 
 of Nature . . . between soul, intellect and 
 matter " ; his main end to bring men to live 
 by the reality of the Idea, by the need to 
 pursue it through all its earthly disguises; 
 and his doctrine deliberately inculcated the 
 scorn of the natural and the physical. Such 
 were some of the conceptions which per- 
 meated the mind of Lorenzo and prompted 
 his thought and daily conduct. His faith 
 was one which warred against what was 
 primitive — ^which made his intellect emotional 
 and his passions cold. 
 
 This new religion was happy in having a 
 great genius to embody it, and to lend it per- 
 manence. Botticelli (1446 or 1447-1500) was 
 the highest expression of this intellectual 
 fantasy. It was not only that he illustrated 
 the Platonic passages in the poems of Poliziano 
 — ^he interpreted Platonic visions. Love he 
 turned into a subtle and enchanting ideal, 
 an elaborate, ethereal form of poetry. The 
 senses are there, but in solution, diffused by 
 fastidious intellect. Wliere passion would have 
 broken his perfect rhythm, he lifted passion 
 to the plane of pure beauty and dispersed it. 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 67 
 
 Not that he is passionless. The intensity of 
 his grey-robed Judith running along the red 
 brick rampart ; the fire and force of the wind- 
 blown revel over starry lawns in his Prima vera, 
 are sufficient proof of that. But he aimed at 
 balance and he generalized. As the greater 
 Greeks generalized for the world and gave it 
 everlasting types of strength and* beauty, so 
 Botticelli generalized for a certain highly re- 
 fined public which came to life in the Renais- 
 sance ; for the mystics of the intellect, whose 
 mind and religion are so finely interwoven 
 that they cannot be separated. Shelley is, 
 perhaps, the spirit most akin to his in outlook 
 — ^in the relation between soul and senses. It 
 is a relation easier to apprehend in literature 
 than in painting. But painting was the best 
 medium for the Renaissance, and, as a painter, 
 Botticelli endures as the fullest expression of 
 his age : of its ideals, maybe also of its weak- 
 ness. He embodies the Platonic Renaissance 
 in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
 
 Botticelli, in great measure, interprets for 
 us certain fashions of love that prevailed, 
 and with them Lorenzo's attitude towards 
 women, which was strongly affected by 
 Plalonism. 
 
68 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Love is a natural business, and Neo- 
 Platonism is not. It despises the natural as 
 the enemy of the soul. The professors of 
 chivalry had long ago preached the worth- 
 lessness of all love excepting that which is 
 born of the soul's choice. It was easy to 
 graft the new Platonism upon such con- 
 ceptions. Lorenzo's loves are the most charm- 
 ing and artificial of sentiments. He kept a 
 kind of Platonic record of them, full of 
 eupheuisms as delicate as those of Sir Philip 
 Sidney; and it is here that he notes his four 
 sonnets to Simonetta Cattaneo, the flame of 
 his brother, Giuliano — the Venus of Botti- 
 celli's pictures, the lady of the rainbow scarf 
 at Chantilly. She died young. The night 
 after her death, he was walking in his garden 
 and he saw a constellation he had never seen 
 before. " Her soul," he said, " hath passed 
 into the new star." His feeling was rather 
 poetry than passion, tmd he soon avowed a 
 longing for some fresh embodiment of his 
 ideal. While still sad because of Simonetta, 
 he went, against his will, to a wedding tourna- 
 ment. There he met a lady who gave him a 
 wreath of violets. " Her beauty was wonder- 
 ful .o . her hands were lovely beyond any 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 69 
 
 that Nature yet had fashioned, her wit fine 
 . . . but without offence. . . . The dead lady 
 had shone Hke a star . . . this lady was the 
 rising sun." Her name was Lucrezia Donati, 
 and he kept his half real, half philandering 
 romance for her long after his happy marriage 
 with Clarice Orsini. 
 
 Platonic influences also entered into the 
 current ideals of friendship, which were lofty, 
 intense, faithfully romantic. Lorenzo's friend- 
 ships, like himself, are typical of his gener- 
 ation. He and his comrades, all equally one 
 another's friends, formed a generous little 
 circle, admiring one another for the best that 
 was in them, each inciting each to high 
 exploits of mind or deed. Marsilio Ficino, 
 Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola were his 
 closest companions. Marsilio, the Christian 
 Humanist, we know ; and Marsilio, the private 
 man, was of one piece with the rest — beauty- 
 loving, pensive, harmonious, giving much 
 time to music as well as to philosophy, prone 
 to melancholy, using his lute as well as his 
 wisdom to dispel the moods that came over 
 him. Poliziano, the poet, considered greater 
 in his own day than any other, the critical 
 editor of manuscripts, the tutor of Lorenzo's 
 
70 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 children, the irritable man of letters who 
 constantly fancied himself slighted, was, not- 
 withstanding his foibles, essentially noble, and 
 could sacrifice ease for the sake of knowledge. 
 " Nature and youth," he once said, " drew 
 me to Homer," and his translation of the 
 Iliad (the second book) into Latin was 
 completed before he was eighteen. 
 
 But Pico dell a Mirandola was the idol of 
 the group and the youngest. Irresistible in 
 grace, blest by birth and fortune, his golden 
 hair falling round his sensitive face, he must 
 have looked like that young man in the 
 Louvre whom Raphael painted with such 
 deep serenity in his eyes. The gods loved 
 him and he died young; but not before he 
 had achieved enough for a lifetime. He had 
 all the accomplishments of the Renaissance 
 phoenix. At twenty-one he already knew 
 twenty-two languages; he was a fervent 
 Platonist of the Ficino School; he was also 
 a brilliant Orientalist, versed in Hebrew, 
 Arabic, Chaldean. The East — " my East ", 
 he called it — exercised a strong spell over 
 him. And in the Cabbala, after true Platonic 
 fashion, he sought for unity with Christi- 
 anity and found " the basis of all religion." 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 71 
 
 Phoenixes are not humble birds. At the same 
 age of twenty-one Pico proposed to discuss 
 nine hundred propositions before the Pope. 
 Innocent VIII, perhaps unwilling to listen, 
 condemned them, and only when Alexander 
 Borgia wore the mitre did Rome forgive 
 Pico. We can see him more easily in Florence 
 than in Rome — where he did not arrive till 
 1480 — sitting with his well-loved Marsilio, 
 as they held long evening discussions with 
 Jewish pundits on the inspiration of the 
 Prophets. 
 
 , Pico had power because he went to the end 
 of his ideas. He was regarded " as a saint," 
 says the Ferrarese ambassador. A fitting saint 
 for a diplomatist's calendar, and one whose 
 adventures were not always saintly. But it 
 is remarkable — a proof that the Platonists of 
 the Renaissance represented its real religious 
 element — ^that Pico and Marsilio Ficino, the 
 Platonist friends of Lorenzo, should, as well 
 as Botticelli, have later gone over to the 
 reforming friar, Savonarola: Pico with all 
 the fire of his nature. He burned his love- 
 poems, he decided to become a friar and to 
 walk barefoot through the world. Death 
 alone frustrated his resolve. And Savonarola 
 
72 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 it was who also touched the reHgious chord 
 in the dilettante Lorenzo, and, like some 
 haunting power, divided him against himself, 
 to his own discomfort, since he had not the 
 strength to capitulate. In their search for 
 unity these men found something deeper. 
 " Thou hast conquered, oh pale Galilean," 
 Lorenzo says in the person of Julian the 
 Apostate, in a play that he wrote for his 
 children. The words foretold the final failure 
 of the intellectual ideals of the Renaissance. 
 
 Meanwhile there was no reoining. Happi- 
 ness, large-hearted and selfish, prevailed, and 
 Plato suited the times because Plato had no 
 trace of Puritanism. The man of the Renais- 
 sance needed joy and contrast. " We rode 
 along singing," wrote Poliziano, as they 
 journeyed one Lent from Florence to Pisa, 
 " singing and sometimes talking theology, so 
 as not to forget the season of fasting. Lorenzo 
 was triumphant. At San Miniato, we tried 
 to read some of St. Augustine, but the reading 
 was soon exchanged for music and for polish- 
 ing up the figure of a dancer, which we found 
 there." Religious literature, literary religion, 
 lute-playing, talk, delight in the antique — 
 such was the Lent of the Renaissance. 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 73 
 
 If at one moment Lorenzo is sitting in the 
 crowded Duomo, hearing Coello on Dante, at 
 another he is watching the dance of myrtle- 
 crowned boys and white-robed children in 
 the Carnival listening to his own drinking 
 songs, or talking on equal terms with bluff 
 old Niccolo Grosso, the ironsmith; or dis- 
 patching Lascaris to Mount Athos in search 
 of manuscripts ; or hawking alone among the 
 hills amidst the crackling leaves of autumn 
 and the sappy buds of Spring, which he knew 
 so well how to describe simply in a day when 
 other poets were elaborate; or appearing 
 at the great Joust he gave in honour of 
 Lucrezia Donati, a diamond in the centre 
 of his shield, his scarf embroidered with pearls 
 and roses, " Le temps revient " blazoned upon 
 his standard — and le temps was the eternal 
 Spring of the Idea. 
 
 The joy of this revelling had its brutal side. 
 Sensibility and imagination were lavished 
 upon the furnishing forth of life, and there 
 was little to spare for humanity. At one 
 Pageant, a generation later, a little boy who 
 represented the Golden Age was so thickly 
 painted with gold that he died. His death 
 at all events served to point out the weakness 
 
74 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of the Golden Age itself. Practical kindness 
 was not its strong point. 
 
 And yet, at any given moment, the re- 
 sponsive man of the Renaissance, the dealer 
 in contrasts, might become anything. After 
 a long day's hunt, or a banquet more Bacchic 
 than Platonic, in the midst of his manu- 
 scripts and medals, Lorenzo would suddenly 
 fall silent. The mystic mood that his friends 
 knew well had come over him. And his mys- 
 ticism proceeded neither from the aesthete's 
 fastidious disgust of life, nor from a craving 
 for novelty. It arose in a soul foiled by the 
 senses and ever unsatisfied. " The beginning 
 of the true life," he once wrote, " is the end 
 of the life which is not true." This is the 
 Lorenzo who felt the power of Savonarola. 
 
 Lorenzo's day is, as was said, the high-tide 
 mark of the Renaissance. His reign saw art 
 and learning at the point after which they 
 were bound to decline, for all fullness con- 
 tains in it the germs of decay. Unconsciously 
 he and his contemporaries stood between two 
 worlds — the past which ere long was to end, 
 and a modern world of which that past con- 
 tained the hidden seed. Lorenzo is one of 
 the first people who possesses in his sayings. 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 75 
 
 letters, poems, that personal note, that sense 
 of intimacy, which distinguishes our art, our 
 correspondence, our manners, from those of 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. And 
 if he bears in him, as it were, the presentiment 
 of a decadence to come, so does the art which 
 expressed his time. The beginnings of such 
 a decadence are enchanting. They may run 
 counter to a great classical tradition, but they 
 make a personal appeal. It is part of the 
 spell of Leonardo, of Botticelli, of Piero di 
 Cosimo, of Poliziano and of the sculptors — of 
 Verocchio and Desiderio and Mino da Fiesole 
 — ^that they are not simple. They are, on 
 the contrary, subtle and secret and elaborate 
 — intellectual, not primitive. Their types 
 are non-natural, as are also those of their 
 great contemporaries in Umbria and Padua, 
 Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna. 
 They paint such people as the average man 
 would call queer: the baffling eyes and lips 
 of those who have grown old enough to press 
 life for an answer to its riddle — who will 
 never grow old enough to find it. 
 
 In literature, in the drama, the same 
 subtlety is not observable. The drama, as 
 elsewhere, was evolved from the Morality 
 
76 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Plays and from dramatized versions of the 
 Legends of the Saints. But, in histrionic Italy, 
 more speedily than in other countries, did 
 they develop into full-fledged tragedies. And 
 two poets at least would be hard to forget — 
 Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici. The origin- 
 ality of both lay chiefly in the fact that they 
 revived the vernacular; that they continued 
 what Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, had begun, 
 and sought to restore their language to its 
 due dignity. 
 
 Even^in his Latin poems Poliziano was an 
 innovator, and imbued classical form with the 
 spirit of the Renaissance. But his best work 
 — his high fantastical verses, jewelled and 
 embroidered like the pictures — ^his descrip- 
 tions of the great ladies of Florence masked in 
 tales of mythology — are in his native Tuscan, 
 chief among them his Stanze, written to 
 celebrate Giuliano's famous Tournament. 
 
 Lorenzo rivalled him in richness and in 
 rhythm, whether in the Selve d^ Amove, his 
 poem in honour of Simonetta, or in his de- 
 licious lines of welcome to the month of May, 
 or in his idyllic poems, the Ambra and the 
 Caccia, with their fresh perception of sport 
 and of nature. 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 77 
 
 Both of these poets owed much to that 
 expressive Tuscan folk-song which ran the 
 gamut from the broad and racy irony of 
 the lyrics of street and country-side, to love 
 ditties and spiritual Laude, They recognized 
 that the true Italian genius lay here, and 
 that when poetry left this high-road it too 
 often became no more than a stilted imitation 
 of the classics with no life of its own. 
 
 Apart from Poliziano and Lorenzo there are 
 few writers' names worth remembering by any 
 but the curious man of letters. Luigi Pulci, 
 renowned in his day, revived romance in 
 his epic of chivalrous adventure, Morgante 
 Maggiore, a strange jumble of piety and 
 ribaldry, of naivete and cynicism. Boiardo 
 (1434-1494) wrote Orlando Innamorato, the 
 crude parent of Ariosto's later masterpiece. 
 And there were, besides, two works, one 
 in verse, one in prose, which considerably 
 affected contemporary imagination, because, 
 like our problem-novels, they touched on the 
 questions in the air, rather than because 
 of any intrinsic merit. That in prose was 
 Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poli- 
 phyli, or PoliphiVs Strife of Love in a Dream, 
 published in Italian by the Aldine Press 
 
78 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and dedicated, in 1467, to Guidobaldo of 
 Urbino : a eupheuistic allegory of the pro- 
 gress and relations of the Senses, Freewill and 
 Reason ; of Love, in its different stages, from 
 its crudest wakening to its arrival at the 
 shrine of Venus, the source of life. The other 
 book, written in terza rima, in the middle of 
 the fifteenth century, is the Citta di Vita, by 
 Matteo del Palmieri. Its central tenet, that 
 the souls of men are the rebel angels of 
 heaven, duly censured as heresy, took the 
 fancy of Botticelli and inspired him to paint 
 his Assumption of the Virgin to illustrate 
 it : a picture (by some now supposed to be 
 that in the National Gallery) which fell 
 under priestly ban and was covered in the 
 church where it hung by a veil which hid it 
 from men's sight. 
 
 But it is not in poetry that we must at this 
 time seek the glory of literature in Florence. 
 It was later, in prose, that Letters gained the 
 finest laurels, in a region in which the Latin 
 gift for concrete matter-of -factness has especial 
 scope — the region of history and politics, of 
 Guiccardini and Macchiavelli. 
 
 Among the artists, however, as is fitting, 
 do we find the final exponent of the prime 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 79 
 
 of the Renaissance, not merely a perfect 
 interpreter of its thought and poetry, like 
 Botticelli, but a complete epitome of all its 
 multiform energies, whether in art or know- 
 ledge. This exponent is Leonardo da Vinci 
 (1452-1519). In his infinite variety he is a 
 head and shoulders taller than his tall con- 
 temporaries, and as it is with Shakespeare, so 
 with him, we can best measure his stature by 
 comparing it with the height and number of 
 those about him. 
 
 They did not yet include the only man of 
 equal bulk. Michael Angelo w^as still a boy, 
 dining silently at Lorenzo's table and study- 
 ing the antique in Lorenzo's palace gardens. 
 But since the days of Cosimo the world of 
 art had become ever more thickly populated 
 with men whose individuality was gradually 
 overriding tradition, and at the cook-shop 
 in the Square new generations had grown up 
 and passed away. In 1490, at the close of 
 Lorenzo's reign, Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), the 
 popular painter, the romantic, prosaic story- 
 teller on canvas, was drawing towards the 
 close of his busy life. Benozzo Gozzoli (1420- 
 1497) had long since finished his glowing 
 frescoes on the walls of the Riccardi Palace, 
 
80 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 in which an ideaHzed Lorenzo rides disguised 
 a«s one of the Magi. Piero di Cosimo (1462- 
 1521) had brought his strong brush and subtle 
 intellectual fancy to bear upon tales of heroes 
 and demigods; Antonio Pollaiuolo (142-9- 
 1498) lent them his force, his curiosity, his 
 skill and joy in problems of anatomy. Out- 
 side Florence, the incomparable Mantegna 
 (1431-1506) was brooding over his antiques, 
 and fashioning his statuesque men and women, 
 now at his native Padua, now at Mantua, in 
 the Castello, under the rich and worrying 
 patronage of the Duchess, Isabella d'Este, 
 the wife of the reigning Gonzaga. And Piero 
 della Francesca (1420-1492) had portrayed 
 wellnigh the last of his majestic, square- 
 browed women with necks like pillars, so 
 reminiscent of the Etruscan figures dug up 
 in the fields of his Umbria; had painted his 
 great battles, his snorting horses, his soldiers 
 in blue and bronze; above all, his rose- 
 wreathed risen Christ, regal, austere, com- 
 pelling, on the walls of the Palazzo Communale 
 of his birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro. 
 
 Luca Signorelli (1450-1523), the painter of 
 Orvieto's Cathedral, was making fresh dis- 
 coveries in anatomy and inaugurating a new 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 81 
 
 kind of naturalism, in which science some- 
 times got the better of art; was, with his 
 nude boys and strong, full -breasted Madonnas, 
 preparing the way for his future pupil, Michael 
 Angelo. While at Venice, the day of Giovanni 
 Bellini (1428?-1516) was continuaiig, and that 
 of Carpaccio dawning; the noonday of Titian, 
 Tintoret, Veronese was still to come. And 
 Ferrara, under the princely Estes, could boast 
 of Cossa (died about 1480) the colourist, the 
 poetic painter of the pageant of stars and 
 seasons in the Schifanoia Palace; as well as 
 of the exotic Cosimo di Tura, (1432-1496), 
 with a taste more ascetic than spiritual, with 
 his strange, austere, anatomical contortions 
 and his fervid fancy. 
 
 Nor were sculptors wanting, more especially 
 in Tuscany. Hardly two years had passed 
 since the death of Andrea Verrocchio (1435- 
 1486), the master of Leonardo, the man who, 
 after Donatello, had done most to fuse the 
 real and the ideal and to keep a suavity in 
 strength : the master of enigmatic marble 
 women, of the earnest, doubting St. Thomas 
 and the understanding Christ, those two bronze 
 figures in the niche of Or San Michele; the 
 creator, above all, of the little King of Life, 
 
 F 
 
82 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the bronze boy with the dolphin in his arm, 
 who enhances the vitality of the world* and 
 guards the; fountain ^ in the court of the 
 Palazzo Vecchio. Desiderio da Settignano 
 (1428-1464) had been trying, with less genius 
 but equal zeal, to make * the same experi- 
 ments when death cut short his career; the 
 facile, eclectic Rossellino (1409-1464) and 
 Benedetto da Maiano (1442-1497) worked 
 by the like noble laws; and so, with his 
 individual chisel, did Mino da Fiesole (1431- 
 1484), Mino, the exquisite, the adept in dis^ 
 tinction, whose grace was his force — ^the 
 sculptor of sentinel -angels and prelates sleep- 
 ing their last sleep, of gold and white shrines, 
 of long-necked Madonnas and babies with 
 dimpled feet. ,; - - ;i ;. v* . '■ - ^ * 
 Out of all this greatness there grew 
 Leonardo da Vinci, im^mortal painter, great 
 sculptor, poet, musician, instrument-maker, 
 thinker, engineer, man of science, prophet of 
 modern methods and inventions; an artist 
 who conceived of art as a vocation harder 
 than that of any monk; the completest man 
 of any excepting Shakespeare, of a vitality as 
 inexhaustible as his, exercised in many more 
 directions. But unlike that of Shakespeare, 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 83 
 
 it was concerned with the intellect, not with 
 life. Leonardo's experience did not throb 
 with tears and laughter; it was passed at 
 once through the crucible of his potent mind. 
 " There is," he wrote, " no capable man, 
 you may believe me, except Leonardo, the 
 Florentine, who has no need to bring himself 
 into notice, because he has work for all his 
 lifetime." That is the clue to him — a. superb 
 consciousness of himself, which led him 
 beyond self, into an impersonal region where 
 he served Truth : " Truth . . . the only 
 daughter of Time," to quote his words. 
 " Savage is he who saves himself," he wrote, 
 and that economy he never practised. But 
 his art often forced him to be reticent and to 
 avoid his fellows, unless they were colleagues, 
 or employers. " A man," he said, " who 
 serves two masters makes neither a good 
 artist nor a good companion." No less did 
 he insist upon an artist being an adequate 
 man before all else, and for absence of mind 
 he had no mercy. Art was to him an ocean 
 into which all streams — science, experience, 
 knowledge, wit, invention — flowed; to know 
 one thing you must know all. And only 
 to know one thing was a disgrace. " The 
 
84 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 painter," he wrote, " should aim at univer- 
 sality, because there is a great want of self- 
 respect in doing one thing well and another 
 ill." He gave his whole existence to the 
 service of art. 
 
 We know little of his life outside his pro- 
 fessional flittings from Florence to Milan 
 and his stay at the court of Francis I. His 
 chief adventure, and that has not been proved, 
 was that he was appointed engineer to the 
 " Devatdar " of Syria (between 1483 and 1487), 
 and went to Armenia, whence he wrote his 
 vivid, accurate letters about the Caucasus. 
 Even personal details are wanting, except 
 that he was handsome, and so strong that he 
 could break an iron horse-shoe between his 
 fingers. 
 
 Leonardo's chronicle is that of a colossal 
 mind, moving everywhere, observing, regis- 
 tering all things, judging none, loving many, 
 scorning some, pitying most. His fiery 
 compassion embraced every living creature. 
 Now he sees a swarm of bees drowned, 
 now a calf taken from its mother to be 
 killed : " Oh Justice, Oh God, why dost Thou 
 not wake ! " he cries. And he has a use for 
 all things, even the basest refuse in Nature ^ 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 85 
 
 it can be converted into salt, into materials 
 for his palette. Condemnation is a fault in 
 economy, and to him nothing, nobody, is 
 vile. Like Shakespeare and the sun, he 
 shines upon the just and the unjust. In this 
 he is essentially of the later Renaissance. The 
 austere purity of the morals of the Guilds 
 has disappeared. Leonardo is spiritual, but 
 he is a-moral ; he believes in incentives, not 
 in barriers. His morality is, like all else, 
 included and involved in art. " If the thing 
 loved is base, the lover becomes base," he 
 wrote. 
 
 In another fashion, also, does he stand for 
 his generation. His search is no longer for 
 unity, it is for the Universal; he does not 
 desire to draw all things into one, but to 
 open out one thing into all, and Universality, 
 not Unity, is the badge of the later Renais- 
 sance. Leonardo's miraculous range, at once 
 telescope and microscope, sweeps over creation 
 to its smallest detail : over air, fire, water, 
 lightning, dust and mist; over every bird, 
 beast and plant, with their habits; over 
 mechanics, " the Paradise of mathematics, 
 because here we come to its fruits " ; over 
 the place of miracles in a Nature that " is 
 
86 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 full of infinite causes " ; and over the evils 
 of swaddling-bands for babies whose " tear- 
 ful complaints " none understand ; over the 
 methods of naval warfare and the art of con- 
 structing a clean stable, of building a temple, 
 and of dressing well ; over the shape of Mount 
 Taurus and the curves of the human figure 
 and the movements of the Loire at Amboise, 
 with all their consequences ; over the non- 
 existence of ghosts, on the ground that if they 
 were existent they would imply a vacuum 
 in Nature, and hence are impossible. He 
 played on a silver lute made by himself in 
 the shape of a horse's head, according to 
 laws of acoustics that he had discovered; and 
 he was courtier enough to obey the constant 
 summons of the Duke of Milan to make 
 music for him at the Castello. He invented 
 flying-machines, he foreshadowed steamboats, 
 he loved velocity. " In Romagna, the realm 
 of all stupidity, vehicles with four wheels 
 are used," runs one of his jottings. He was a 
 deep student of the laws of optics ; he believed 
 in the infinite divisibility of matter. " Every 
 quantity is intellectually conceivable as in- 
 finitely divisible. What is called Nothingness 
 is to be found only in time and in speech," 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 87 
 
 Leonardo is a living proof that nothing is so 
 definite and practical as real imagination, and 
 the best definition of his calm and bound- 
 less curiosity lies in the juxtaposition of such 
 entries in his note-books as — 
 
 " Paul was snatched up to heaven." . . . 
 " Giuliano da Maria, physician, has a steward 
 without hands." ..." Giants who lived in 
 the sea upon whales, grampuses and ships." 
 ..." Snow taken from the high peaks of 
 mountains might be carried to hot places and 
 let to fall at festivals in open places at summer 
 time," and the like. 
 
 To him nothing was dull but unreality and 
 its shibboleths. He distrusted what he called 
 " good culture without the disposition." Any- 
 one," said he, " who in discussion relies upon 
 authority, uses not his understanding but his 
 memory." Above all, he loved and sought 
 the strange. He would follow a face that 
 took his fancy all day through the streets 
 of Milan. Once he brought into his room a 
 number of reptiles — ^toads, efts, vipers, newts 
 and lizards — ^and, choosing some part of each, 
 made of them a creature so dreadful that none 
 could see it without terror. The story might 
 serve as a symbol of his imagination. Unlike 
 
88 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the more facile minds that draw a fictitious 
 real out of the fantastic, Leonardo evoked 
 the fantastic from the real only and would 
 have no other kind. 
 
 But with all his taste for the grotesque, he 
 never tried to garble truth. Patience was his 
 heritage from the earlier scholars of the New 
 Learning ; reverence for fact was the link that 
 bound him to modern minds. Together these 
 qualities formed the critical spirit. Leonardo 
 was the first modern man of science. 
 
 " Impatience, the mother of stupidity, 
 praises brevity," he says, " and then men 
 want to comprehend the mind of God, in 
 which the Universe is included. Oh, human 
 stupidity ! do you not perceive, though you 
 have been with yourself all your life, that 
 yoa are not yet aware of the thing that 
 yoa possess most of — that is, your folly ? 
 You deceive yourself and others, despising 
 the mathematical sciences in which truth 
 dwells. . . . And then you occupy yourself 
 with miracles . . . and you fancy you have 
 wrought miracles when you spoil a work of 
 some speculative mind." 
 
 Or again : " Short cuts do harm to know- 
 ledge and to love." 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 89 
 
 This last saying might be taken as one 
 key-note of his attitude to knowledge; his 
 " Wisdom is the Daughter of experience," 
 as the other. This was the revolutionary 
 note; it effected for natural science, what 
 the earlier Renaissance had effected for 
 scholarship — it put experience where men 
 had hitherto put authority. Leonardo would 
 acknowledge none of the "ancients" in 
 science, except Archimedes. " He who can 
 go to the fountain, does not go to the water," 
 he said, and his words rang in inductive 
 science: rang in the investigators of Nature, 
 from Rabelais, Galileo, Palissy, Bacon and 
 Montaigne, to Newton, Boyle, Huxley and 
 Darwin. 
 
 To Leonardo, the Nature -worshipper. 
 Nature was a measureless workshop — a work- 
 shop with dark corners, but not so dark 
 that man might not explore them if he ap- 
 proached with candour and humility. He 
 recognized Nature's ravaging cruelty, but 
 he regarded her as governed by immutable 
 laws. He took her no farther than she 
 would go. Man might only handle facts — 
 he left mystery to God. And before mystery 
 Leonardo bowed. True once more to the 
 
90 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Renaissance, he believed in soul as strongly 
 as in science, and without trying to make 
 them one, as a Ficino would have done, he 
 was convinced that each must work out its 
 own ends. All truth, he saw, was related. 
 He was spiritual rather than religious, a 
 spiritual freethinker, a Theist, who felt that 
 freedom gave fitter scope than a cage to the 
 wings of human faith. He hated cages and 
 cage-keepers. He thought that they bred 
 self-love and hypocrisy. " Pharisees, that is 
 to say Friars," is one of his headings; and 
 under " Churches and Habitations of Friars," 
 " many there will be," he wrote, " who will 
 give up work and labour and poverty of life 
 and of goods, and will go to live among wealth 
 in splendid buildings, declaring that this is the 
 way to make themselves acceptable to God." 
 But he waged war against materialism and 
 its followers — " sacks in which their food may 
 be stowed " — and he firmly believed in the 
 great destiny of the soul. " Our body is 
 dependent on heaven, and heaven on the 
 Spirit," he said. ..." The part always has 
 a tendency to reunite with its whole." " The 
 hope and desire of returning home to a former 
 otate is hke that of the moth to the light." 
 
LORENZO IL IVIAGNIFICO 91 
 
 " The motive power is the cause of all life." 
 Such was his creed. He made against dogma, 
 for the sake of faith ; the power of the Spirit 
 filled him with awe. " Throughout Europe,'* 
 he wrote one Good Friday, " there will be a 
 lamentation of great nations over the death 
 of one man who died in the East." And this 
 thought of the human -divine, with its sense 
 of human possibilities and divine inspiration, 
 blows straight from the Renaissance through 
 a great and fervent intellect which acknow- 
 ledged the unknown. 
 
 A modern Leonardo was, also, in another 
 sense. He was a conscious stylist who 
 knew the importance of culmination. "The 
 pen," he wrote, " must necessarily have the 
 penknife for companion." For him the artist 
 no longer ranked with other craftsmen. He 
 says so in his Fable, brief and tense, of the 
 pear-tree, who, commiserated by the other 
 trees, was about to be cut down and borne 
 from the grove. "I am going," replied the 
 pear-tree, " with the husbandman ... to the 
 workshop of a good sculptor, and he will make 
 me take the form of Jove the God; and 1 
 shall be dedicated in a temple and adored by 
 men . . . while you . . . remain stripped oi 
 
92 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 your boughs, which will be put round me to 
 do me honour." 
 
 It is a tragic calamity that Leonardo's 
 model for his great equestrian statue of 
 Francesco Sforza should never have been 
 executed and should have been destroyed; 
 that his sculpture should be lost, as well as 
 so many of his paintings ; that of these only 
 his Last Supper at Milan, his two Virgins of 
 the Rocks — one in Paris, one in London — ^his 
 unfinished Adoration of the Magi in the 
 Ufiizi, his Medusa, also there, the Virgin 
 and St. Anne of the Louvre, and its Mona 
 Lisa, should, with some precious draw- 
 ings, constitute all the authentic work we 
 have from his hand. Yet each of these 
 relics contains the essence of him, none is 
 inadequate. Perhaps self-expression came to 
 him more easily because one thing, as it 
 seems, was left out of him — ^the power of 
 suffering. Intellect makes against emotion; 
 he was too much of a disembodied intellect — 
 too much set upon reaching its goal, serenity 
 of mind — ^to have much capacity for pain. 
 Michael Angelo it was who showed the world 
 what it was to have a genius for suffering, to 
 strike the deeper, intimate note which went 
 
LORENZO IL MAGNIFICO 93 
 
 home to men's business and bosoms — the 
 note of struggle, which broke up the smiling 
 beauty of the Renaissance. Such was not 
 the office of Leonardo. He loved what was 
 secret and hidden; he courted mystery, for 
 it did not make him ill at ease ; he was a kind 
 of mystical sceptic and believed that Truth, 
 the " Daughter of Time " would give a final 
 answer. Much of this stands revealed in the 
 types that he chose; in the thin, subtle lips 
 of his men, in the smile that haunted his 
 women's faces. He suggests, he provokes, 
 he satisfies. He belongs to all times. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 
 
 If Florence embodied the Renaissance in 
 its most individual aspect, Rome, was like 
 a statement of the movement in its most 
 generalized form. This was natural. Rome 
 was cosmopolitan; it was the seat of the 
 Curia and the Vatican, the centre, therefore, 
 of wealthy patrons and delicate dilettantes, 
 of connoisseurs in art and in scholarship who 
 kept retinues of artists and scholars and 
 vulgarly vied with one another in their 
 excesses of refinement. Free from any stress 
 of responsibility, even that of earning their 
 emoluments, and disliking the grosser sem- 
 blances of the materialism they professed, 
 they ended by putting fastidiousness in the 
 place of spirituality, and became theologians 
 over questions of taste. A time when pre- 
 lates would not read St. Paul because the 
 impure Latin might spoil their style; when 
 
 ^neas Silvius, later Pius II, complained that 
 
 94 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN, ROME 95 
 
 so many church-bells were bad for a man of 
 letters; when beauty was truth, and the 
 truth was by no means beautiful, this wa s 
 a better time for art and learning than for 
 religion. ^C:»n.' 
 
 And Rome, with the surrounding Cam- 
 pagna, where every turn of the spade or 
 plough might bring to light some age-long 
 hidden Venus, or marble athlete; where 
 each overflow of the yellow Tiber might 
 disclose precious freight, was, as it were, 
 the main cistern of the Renaissance — not 
 of its ideas, but of its solid wealth. Here 
 Eugenius IV, on his walks, would stop to 
 watch the excavations; here Cardinals could 
 buy a field cheap and find it a priceless in- 
 vestment; here, for artists and adventurers 
 alike, there prevailed security and apprecia- 
 tion. Small wonder that such a climate 
 forced on the Renaissance, which, under its 
 influence, ripened quicker here than elsewhere 
 and earlier showed symptoms of decline. 
 Rome fostered the fine flower 'of a serene 
 Epicureanism, which found its perfect ex- 
 pression in Raphael, its reactionary opponent 
 in Michael Angelo; developed, also, the 
 consummate art of a complacent expediency. 
 
96 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 embodied in Macchiavelli, and counteracted 
 by the idealist, Giordano Bruno. It was,- in 
 short, the Rome of the Popes and Cardinals 
 of the Renaissance, and they, in their turn, 
 were epitomized, if a little caricatured, in the 
 exuberant cynicism of Pietro Aretino. 
 
 From the day of Eugenius IV (1431-1447) 
 and his successor, the scholarly Nicholas V, 
 the founder of the Vatican Library and the 
 patron of Fra Angelico, to that of Pius IV, 
 these hierarchs formed a dynasty of sump- 
 tuous and unscrupulous patrons. It was not 
 surprising that when young Giovanni de' 
 Medici went to Rome, his father Lorenzo 
 warned him to beware of his conduct in that 
 " sink of iniquity." Charity has not been the 
 only cloak for a multitude of sins, and the 
 elastic mantle of Rome also covered disbeliefs. 
 It was a sign of men's decadence that they 
 knew what they disbelieved, rather than what 
 they believed. Disbelief was convenient to 
 them with its sanction of their vices. The 
 dead roots of a dead religion had been left in 
 the soil and made corruption more corrupt. 
 " Religion must not be regarded as old wives' 
 stories,'*^ said a would-be defender of ortho- 
 doxy. That Christianitywas jook ed upon as 
 
/' 
 
 THE RExNTAISSANCE IN ROME 97 
 
 an uneducated superstition is indicated by the. ^ 
 fact that Cardnal Sadoleto, Leo X's secretary, 
 was nickname 1 "the Christian Cardinal." The 
 uninterfering deities of past ages were alone 
 attended to. • One prelate swore only by l/^ . 
 them, another spoke of a friend who had ']a^''' '^ 
 died, as danc.ng "in the mystic dance with 
 the Olympiarv gods." Burlesques were acted 
 of the early Christians' doings in the cata- 
 combs, and men changed their Christian 
 names for those of Roman heroes. Licence 
 and indifference masqueraded in the guise 
 of freethought; not the truth-seeking free- 
 thought of Leonardo, but a materialism that 
 meant to shake off shackles. The infallible 
 Popes found it easier than ordinary folk to 
 separate their lives from their office; they 
 foreshadowed modern notions and made them- 
 selves into " Super-men." " Let us," said 
 Leo X, " enjoy the Papacy since God has 
 given it to us," and he thought no worse of 
 himself for saying it. 
 
 It cannot be denied that Pius II, Paul II. 
 Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VL 
 Pius III, Julius II, Leo X, the best-known 
 Popes of the period between 1458 and 1522, 
 were all more or less unscrupulous and most 
 
 G 
 
98 THE RENAISSAl^TCE 
 
 of them evil. Sixtus IV was an accomplice 
 in the plot against the Medici which ended 
 in the murder of Giuliano; Alexander VI, 
 with due deduction for lege, id, shows an 
 appalling record of crimes. Poison in their 
 time was a fine art, simony and theft were in 
 the day's work. And the Cardinals followed 
 suit, Alexander's son, Cesare ^'^orgia (1475- 
 1507) chief among them. Yet, whatever 
 these men appear to us, to their own age 
 they did not seem monsters, ard their signifi- 
 cance lies, not in their immorality, but in the 
 I'owness of the moral level taat made them 
 possible. There are one or two evident 
 reasons why„ Rome-should- have been more 
 corrupt than other cities./^' It wasjiie^religious 
 metropolis of the ..world, with all the world's 
 paraphernalia for religion — the place where 
 faith was bound to grow professional ; it was 
 .-v^also the treasury of a wealth which meant 
 ^ power without effort. Unlike Lorenzo and 
 his circle, the patrons of Rome were not 
 artists, they were collectors and millionaires; 
 and scholarship, their one serious occupation, 
 was no longer the strenuous pursuit it had 
 been in the past generation. It had become 
 exquisite, a little dandified, an opportunity 
 
 ^ 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 99 
 
 for style rather than a means to knowledge. 
 Yet it is among men of learning, however 
 degenerate, that the more remarkable spirits, 
 whether churchmen or laymen, are to be 
 found. 
 
 The forcing-house of Rome very early 
 produced the tvpe of the Polonius-scholar. 
 ^neas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope 
 Pius II (1405-1464), lived at the same time 
 as Cosimo, and while the morals of Florence 
 were still at their purest, he was already an 
 advanced opportunist. The most disinter- 
 ested of students, the most self-interested of 
 worldlings, he left his native Siena to be a 
 great man's secretary at the Council of Basel, 
 where his remarkable literary gifts stood him 
 in good stead. In the same kind of capacity, 
 this born adventurer travelled to England, 
 Scotland, Flanders, France, wielding his pen 
 first on this side then on that, as suited his 
 fortunes, selling his services as dear as he 
 could. When Italy became inconvenient, he 
 got an advantageous post in Germany, and 
 by using his talents against old friends, 
 leaped rather than rose to be a Cardinal and, 
 ere long, a Pope (1458). Suave, brilliant, 
 clement, when he ran no risk by clemency, 
 
100 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of a finely polished culture, he would have 
 been surprised to find himself regarded as 
 immoral. The obligation to " get on " was 
 to him what the duty of self-dependence is 
 to us ; it was the respectability of the Renais- 
 sance. The diligent service of the master 
 who happened best to promote one's chances, 
 and loyalty to him while he was useful, was 
 the only code of honour then acknowledged, 
 and Pope Pius talks of these his virtues with 
 an air as noble as that of any Bayard. That 
 his pontificate should induce him to withdraw 
 from publication his improper novel Lucretia 
 and Euryalus, and his equally undesirable 
 Letters, would have seemed to him foolish. 
 He turned his thoughts to art, and employed 
 
 %f. Pinturicchio to paint his life in the Cathedral 
 
 '^^ Library of his native Siena. 
 
 Or there was Cardinal Bembo, who 
 flourished half a century later as secretary 
 of Leo X, and yet was Pius II's spiritual 
 contemporary. But he was of better stuff 
 and of more distinguished literary gifts. In 
 the elegance of his Latinity he was second 
 only to Lorenzo Valla. Graceful, yet of a 
 racy wit, he was a born letter-writer, and a 
 critic of himself so severe that he revised 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 101 
 
 every one of his works forty times before 
 publishing it. Not without success. His 
 Asolani, an idyll dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia, 
 was hailed with hyperbole by the literary 
 circles of his generation. Nevertheless he 
 rendered real service to literature, for, lover 
 of the classics though he was, he saw the worth 
 and the beauty of the Italian vernacular and 
 carried on the work of Poliziano. His Defence 
 of the Vulgar Tongue showed him a more suit- 
 able guardian of the language than of the faith. 
 But in the topsy-turvy morality of the age 
 he shines with a paradoxical lustre. For he 
 remained faithful to the mother of his five 
 children till her death, and his last poem to 
 her was written fourteen years later, and three 
 years after he was made Cardinal. 
 
 Among these scarlet-hatted sybarites and 
 easy-going literati there had, however, been, 
 here and there, vestiges of the old tradition. 
 There were sober " Academies " for learning, 
 like that of Cardinal Bessarion, the Greek, the 
 pupil of Gemistos Plethon ; or that of Valla's 
 disciple, Pomponius Laetus, the famous 
 lecturer, the enthusiast for Latin. And in 
 the day of Bembo there was at least one noble 
 soul, who brought to freethought the same 
 
102 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 earnestness that his predecessors had put 
 into scholarship. Pomponazzo (1462-1525), 
 the professor of philosophy at Padua, Ferrara 
 and Bologna, restated the 'tenets of Aristotle 
 at the perilous expense of tradition, and 
 devoted his powers with religious zeal to 
 proving from the Stagirite's Be Anima that 
 the soul was not immortal. In this cause, 
 to him the cause of truth, this transcendental 
 materialist gave up ease and suffered perse- 
 cution. " Seeking to penetrate the secret 
 things of God," a man, he says, " forgets to 
 thirst, to hunger, to sleep, to spit ... is 
 derided of all men and held for a fool." 
 Pomponazzo's quest involved more than a 
 philosophical dispute. Orthodoxy had made 
 its stronghold in the mediaeval version of 
 Aristotle. The publication of emended editions 
 (1468-1498) had already dealt the Church a 
 heavy blow, but the loud proclamation of 
 the philosopher's real ideas was a trumpet- 
 blast before which the city fell. Since the 
 twelfth century war had raged round him 
 and round the nature of the soul, between 
 the followers of the Arab heretic, Averroes, 
 who believed that the soul was part of a Uni- 
 versal Intelligence, and those of Alexander of 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 103 
 
 Aphrodisias, who believed that the soul was 
 evolved from the senses, and the mind from the 
 soul. To these names in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, was added that of the great Thomas 
 Aquinas, who took the vague and unrelated 
 God of Aristotle and placed him in the centre 
 of the Christian theology, with its implica- 
 tion of His direct dealings with the immortal 
 soul of man. Pomponazzo went back from 
 the commentators to the original source ; and 
 his studies led him to espouse and to develop 
 the views of Alexander. Since, he said, soul 
 and mind were derived from matter and were 
 inseparable from the body, since they had 
 no link with the Universal Intellect outside 
 them, it followed that they must perish with 
 the body. He preached the permanence of 
 natural law; he denied the existence of 
 miracles, of angels and demons. How could 
 we believe in them, when each religion had 
 its own Saints and miracles? To him Christ 
 and Moses and Mahomet ranked as equals, 
 and only a superstitious ignorance lent them 
 miraculous qualities. Christianity would de- 
 cay like other creeds and institutions; there 
 were signs of its approaching end. 
 
 Small wonder that the Church scented 
 
104 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 danger in the air. The Lateran Council of 
 1513 (the year of Leo X's accession) passed 
 a decree forbidding professors of philosophy 
 to teach any tenets but those of orthodoxy, 
 and banned the doctrine of the soul's mortality. 
 Such utterances did not check Pomponazzo. 
 He continued his train of thought. Yet so 
 baffling is the mind of him who stands be- 
 tween an old world and a new, so crude is he 
 and crafty, so sincere and insincere, so much 
 the victim of the Church that bred him and of 
 the tradition he rejects, that this bold man 
 of science was wont to solve insuperable 
 difficulties by his confidence in the influence 
 of the stars. In 1516 he published J^iis great 
 De Immortalitate animce. It raised a storm; 
 pamphlets poured in upon him ; it was burnt 
 at Venice, and he only escaped persecution 
 through Bembo's intercession with Pope Leo» 
 The book contained nothing that could matter, 
 was the Cardinal's plea. His task was not 
 difficult for, in spite of the Lateran Council, 
 Leo X himself disbelieved in the immortality 
 of the soul. Pomponazzo got off by making 
 a paradoxical declaration that it was only as 
 a philosopher that he believed in his pro- 
 positions; as a Christian, he accepted the 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 105 
 
 whole orthodox faith. He knew that ideas 
 were indestructible. And his work met a need 
 which continued. When one of his disciples 
 lectured at Pisa and began on Aristotle's 
 meteorological treatises, the audience broke 
 out into turbulent shouts of " Quid de anima ? " 
 —"What of the soul?" 
 
 Leo X and his two predecessors, Alexander 
 VI and Julius II, may be taken as the arche- 
 types of the Popes of the Renaissance. That 
 race of potentates presents certain contra- 
 dictory aspects. With them, more than with 
 other rulers, mediaevalism lingered on ; it was 
 to their interest to keep things as they had 
 been, as well as to fight for their territories; 
 to them, too, belonged the faculty to tap un- 
 precedented sources of wealth. They could 
 always raise money — if by nothing else, by the 
 pretence of a Crusade against the Turks, and 
 thus they had ready means to practise their 
 antiquated privileges. On this raw kind of 
 barbarism the Renaissance was grafted with- 
 out intermediary preparation, and the Princes 
 of the Vatican, whose sway depended as much 
 upon being in accord with the times as behind 
 them, had in some fashion to adopt the new 
 culture. The needful link was provided by 
 
106 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 their wealth, which enabled them to become 
 Patrons. Thus, like the capitalists of our 
 own day, they bought and collected, hired 
 counsellors and artists, without any true 
 love of art or letters. Leo X was the excep- 
 tion, but Leo X was a Medici, polished, 
 astute, aesthetic, critical, though without the 
 poetic or mystic vision of his father, Lorenzo. 
 And yet the Pontiffs of this period, con- 
 querors, robbers and politicians, survive for 
 posterity mainly as the promoters of arts 
 which they regarded as mere merchandise — 
 an asset in their fortunes. Many of them, 
 it is true, cared for architecture, notably 
 Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, and the trio we 
 have chosen; but their vast schemes for 
 rebuilding and extending St. Peter's and 
 the Vatican by Bramante (1444-1514) and 
 Michael Angelo, an(^ the Castel San Angelo 
 by the brothers, Gi^liano and Antonio San- 
 gallo* (1443-1517; 1455?-1534), were a form 
 of self-aggrandizemeiit rather than the result 
 of any beauty-loving impulse. And when 
 Sixtus IV summoned Piero della Francesca 
 
 ♦ There was a third Sangallo, the younger Antonio, 
 nephew of these two, who built the Palazzo Farnese and 
 died in 1546< 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 107 
 
 and others to decorate his Sistine Chapel, the 
 motive was much the same. 
 
 Of the two Popes we have singled out 
 besides Leo X, Alexander VI had a taste for 
 showy splendour, and the rough old soldier, 
 Julius II, liked to think of himself as a great 
 Patron, who could at his will bully artists 
 like a slave-driver, or raise them to the rank 
 of cherished princes. 
 
 It is for reasons outside art that Alexander 
 Borgia figures as a type. With his striking 
 administrative powers, he might have stood 
 out more prominently as a forcible ruler, had 
 not his ill-fame eclipsed his capabilities. He 
 represents, as it were, the opportunities for 
 sin provided by. the Renaissance. This bon 
 vivant and evil liver would have been a signally 
 bad man at any time,^ but the Renaissance, 
 with its classical revival of cynical vices, could 
 alone give him an imagination in his im- 
 morality and enable him to be a dilettante in 
 crime ; no other period could have furnished 
 his appetite with* seasonings so perverted. 
 Artistic murders of friends and relations, 
 disappearances of Cardinals, sudden influxes 
 into Papal coffers, black deeds set to the 
 sound of lutes and viols, have made a proverb 
 
108 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 of him and his son, Cesare, and there was 
 quite enough fire to produce smoke. 
 
 Juhus II and the accompKshed Leo shine 
 by comparison. But they Hve for us now 
 not as Popes and powers, but as the private 
 friends of the real sovereigns — Raphael and 
 Michael Angelo. 
 
 Julius II summoned both these artists to 
 Rome, Angelo in 1503, Raphael in 1506, at 
 the instigation of Raphael's fellow-citizen, 
 the architect, Bramante of Urbino. Angelo 
 was twenty-nine, Raphael twenty-three. His 
 father, Giovanni Santo, that charming painter 
 of slant-eyed Madonnas, had directed his 
 course. The boy had worked under Perugino, 
 had been drawn to Florence by the fame of 
 Leonardo, and was already a master of his craft. 
 Julius employed him at once upon no less a task 
 than the decoration of the Stanze, his chosen 
 apartments in the Vatican. Raphael's suc- 
 cess was born full-grown, and lasted unchanged 
 from his arrival in Rome until his death in 
 1520. It was compelled by his person no 
 less than by his genius — indeed, the two were 
 one. Every one knows his face: the serene 
 brow, the clear unquestioning eyes, the brown 
 hair f allmg from beneath the black cap ; and 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 109 
 
 his looks were but an emblem of his nature. 
 All men, says Vasari, great or small, *' be- 
 came as of one mind when they began to 
 labour in the society of Raphael . . . every 
 base thought departed before his influence 
 . . . his sweet and gracious nature was so 
 perfect in all the charities that not only 
 was he honoured of men, but even of the 
 animals, who would follow his steps and 
 always loved him." Raphael was the Orpheu§ 
 of the Renaissance. Unlike Michael Xngelo, 
 he had no enemies ; he knew neither care nor 
 struggle, and his art, devoid of these elements, 
 remained, like his life, devoid also of that 
 enriching contrast which is so interesting to 
 posterity. " He did not," says a contem- 
 porary, " lead the life of an artist but of .a 
 prince." His palace was built by Bramante; 
 he was rich enough to keep a troop of de- 
 signers all over Italy and Greece; the great 
 Cardinal Bibbiena, whom his brush has 
 immortalized, wanted him to marry his niece. 
 He never, we hear, went out without some 
 " fifty painters " at his heels. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this glory, he kept his 
 singular modesty, and his artist's conscience 
 was intact. " Whether I have in myself any 
 
110 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 portion of the excellence of art," he wrote, 
 " I know not, but labour heartily to secure 
 it." He pursued perfection wherever he 
 found it. When Michael ilngelo's angels on 
 the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were first 
 shown him, there came to him a new revela- 
 tion of the possibilities of his art. He hastened 
 straight to the Church of St. Agostino, where 
 stood his fresco of the Prophet Isaiah — he 
 washed it out and repainted it. With him 
 there was no despair, only accomplishment. 
 His means were always adequate to his ends. 
 The radiant amenity of his Parnassus, with 
 Apollo and all the poets — the lustre of his 
 School of Athens, in which philosophers and 
 theologians are holding converse in true 
 Platonic fashion — the rest of his frescoes in 
 the Stanze, with their feats of foreshortening 
 and perspective — the famous Loggie of the 
 Vatican, with their arabesques and allegories 
 — the Farnesina Villa, painted with the fables 
 of Psyche and of Galatea — ^the sumptuous 
 portraits of rose-robed Popes and scarlet 
 prelates — of his masters Julius II and Leo X, 
 of the Cardinals Bibbiena and Inghirami — 
 testify to the high level of his achievement, 
 to his exquisite sense of colour and of rhythm. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 111 
 
 Much more so than the academic grace and 
 composure of his Holy FamiUes, whose over- 
 formulated beauty made such an easy appeal 
 to many generations ; more than the greatest 
 of these canvases, painted for the Church of 
 San Sisto, the famous Sistine Madonna, with 
 its triumphant Child and all its superb power 
 of composition. 
 
 His mural paintings and his portraits prove, 
 however, that in two capacities his surprising 
 reputation is secure. He is a great decorator, 
 one of the greatest of portrait-painters. His 
 very defects promoted his qualities. The 
 literalness which prevented his seeing the 
 soul of beauty in reality and led him to re- 
 place it by the sublime — which made of him 
 an idealizer, a very different matter from an 
 idealist — helped him to grasp more lucidly 
 and impersonally what was before him, and 
 to give to the world those masterly pictures 
 of the Pagan churchmen and Christian cynics 
 of the day. But he could not have interpreted 
 them thus perfectly had he criticized them. 
 They are painted without satire or protest; 
 he accepted the standards of his time. To 
 him, we may be sure, it did not seem unfitting 
 that Leo X should plan to offer him (as 
 
112 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 tradition tells) a Cardinal's hat. It has been 
 thought that it was one of the motives which 
 made him play fast and loose with his be- 
 trothed, Bibbiena's niece, until the un- 
 fortunate lady died. Perhaps a more potent 
 reason was his romantic love for one mistress, 
 who ruled him altogether. The only way, 
 indeed, that Agostino Chigi could get his 
 palace walls and ceilings finished was by 
 inviting the lady to live there and thus bring 
 the painter back to the house. He was, such 
 is the verdict even of his worshipper, Vasari, 
 " devoted somewhat too earnestly to the 
 pleasures of life." For him there existed 
 no conviction of sin, no day of judgment. 
 Raphael is of the immortals, and his place 
 among them is that of the purest courtier 
 in the court of heaven; he is perhaps the 
 most celestially matter-of-fact genius that 
 has existedo 
 
 " Seeing that good judges and beautiful 
 women are scarce, I avail myself of certain 
 ideas which come into my mind " — so he 
 wrote to Baldassare Castiglione, and the 
 sentence sums up his strength and his limita- 
 tion. He was the genius of taste, not a man 
 of beliefs; his aim was to create complete 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 113 
 
 beauty, to take the human form he knew so 
 well and to idealize it. He was the opposite 
 of Michael Angelo, who took the human 
 form as it was, and wrested beauty from it, 
 beauty rough-hewn but infinite. Michael 
 Angelo endeavoured to make the human 
 divine, Raphael to make the divine human, 
 to re-establish godlike shapes upon the earth. 
 The one stood for harmony and balance, the 
 other for conflict and for depth; the one 
 found his world outside himself, the other 
 within his own soul ; and while one leads you 
 into his heaven and shuts the door behind its 
 radiant security, the other plunges you into 
 hell and raises you to the stars and teaches 
 you the limitless possibilities of spiritual 
 adventure. . : ' 
 
 Michael Angelo Buonarotti faced two ways. 
 If he was the last of the great race of Renais- 
 sance artists, he was also the first of the 
 moderns. He brought into art the element 
 of struggle and of sorrow; he imbued it with 
 religion. Not with the naif dogma of a Fra 
 Angelico, or the ascetic ideals of monastic 
 art, but with spiritual religion — with aspira- 
 tion, with the direct relation of the soul 
 to God, with a deep humility, and as deep 
 
 H 
 
114 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 a sense of man's divine possibilities. " It 
 sufficeth not," he said, "to be merely a great 
 master in painting and very wise, but I 
 think that it is needful for a painter to be 
 very good in his mode of life, even, if possible, 
 a Saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire 
 his intellect." The passage shows him almost 
 as different from Leonardo as from Raphael, 
 It was not that he underrated the intellect — 
 no one had a more forcible mind ; but he was 
 simple, and feeling came first with him. 
 
 Human nature meant to him more than 
 Nature — as the Renaissance used the term. 
 He had a passionate heart, and thus again 
 he introduced an unheard-of element into 
 painting, something far more personal than 
 the intellectual pity of Da Vinci. " No one 
 should laugh," he said, " when the whole 
 world is in tears " — a phrase which falls with 
 a thud of warning in the midst of the light 
 ribaldries of Rome. Yet he was witty him- 
 self, as his sayings attest, and he could 
 laugh till he cried. The whole of his religion 
 seems to be expressed in his two marble 
 Pietas ; the earlier work in St. Peter's, exe- 
 cuted when he first came to Rome ; the later 
 one, sculptured at the close of his life for his 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 115 
 
 own monument, and now in the Duomo of 
 Florence; both aUke the epitome of human 
 sorrow and all that lifts and dignifies it. 
 
 Michael Angelo was a Catholic because he 
 was born one, and because, in his day, Luther 
 represented violence and sensation, neither of 
 which was sympathetic to him. But Savona- 
 rola was the voice to which he listened; his 
 writings and the Scriptures, besides the works 
 of Dante, were his favourite reading. He 
 had, indeed, the Protestant temperament, in 
 the original sense of the word; the spirit 
 which protested against abuses, the un- 
 ecclesiastical mind, to which the life was all, 
 the Church but a means. One day when he 
 was standing intent before Donatello's St. 
 Mark in the niche of Or San Michele : "If 
 St. Mark looked like this," he said, " we may 
 safely believe what he has written." Author- 
 ity meant little to him — conscience, the voice 
 of God in the soul, meant all. He treated 
 Pope and beggar with the same frank human 
 equality; indeed Pope Clement VII always 
 hastened to ask him to sit down in his presence 
 for fear he should do so without leave. 
 
 Buonarotti's art — " mine idol and my 
 lord" — was of one piece with his life. 
 
116 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Nor hath God deigned to show Himself 
 
 elsewhere 
 More clearly than in human forms sublime. 
 Which, since they image Him, alone I 
 
 love, 
 
 runs one of his sonnets. Unlike Raphael, his 
 ends were always greater than his means, yet 
 his means were matter for his profoundest 
 study, for days of hardship and nights of 
 watching, and, however vast the ends, these 
 miraculous means sufficed. And while they 
 amazed all beholders — ^whether on wall or 
 ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or in St. Peter's, 
 or at Florence, in San Lorenzo — ^the master's 
 vision had at once gone on past them to the 
 problems above him and beyond. Unlike 
 Raphael, again, the life of this man acquainted 
 with sorrows and with joys was a tissue of 
 contrasts and of changes. 
 
 His parents were of gentle birth, his foster- 
 mother was a stone-mason's wife. With the 
 milk of his nurse, he says, he sucked in chisels 
 and hammers. But he began as an apprentice 
 to painting, in the bottega of Ghirlandaio, who 
 recognized his powers from the first. After 
 his gift for sculpture had unfolded, he went 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 117 
 
 to study the antiques in the Medici Gardens, 
 where Lorenzo had set them for the training 
 of artists, and he worked with Donatello's old 
 pupil, Bertoldo. Lorenzo knew genius when 
 he saw it. He offered the boy bed and board 
 in his palace ; he dressed him in a violet mantle ; 
 he treated him as a son. And Buonarotti 
 perceived his own vocation. Intense and 
 unremitting in his labours, nothing seemed 
 to him too small or too great to serve his art. 
 Now he is mastering problems of perspective, 
 now dissecting a human body in the room 
 given him by the Prior, in the Church of San 
 Spirito, now reading Petrarch and Boccaccio 
 with a chosen friend. He saw all sorts of 
 men, and, throughout his life, he liked the 
 simple folk, however rude — pedlar-artists and 
 village masons, whose primitive jests and 
 stories delighted him, for whom he would use 
 his chisel that they might sell his works as 
 their own. 
 
 From the day that Julius II called him to 
 Rome, his life, straight and sincere, became 
 involved in the miserable intrigues of adoring 
 Popes, meddling Cardinals, and jealous artists. 
 He lived under the reign of nine pontiffs — 
 Julius II, Leo X, Adrian VI, Clement VIIj 
 
118 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Paul III, Julius III, Marcellus, Paul IV, 
 Pius IV — and these sixty-one years of his 
 existence were practically absorbed by three 
 great dramas : " The Tragedy of the Tomb," 
 as his biographer, Condivi, called the history 
 of the Tomb projected by Julius II; the 
 strenuous, straightforward action of the 
 Sistine Chapel; and the tragi-comedy of St. 
 Peter's. The image of Michael Angelo, seek- 
 ing marble for the Tomb in the quarries of 
 Carrara, kept short of supplies, hampered, 
 undaunted, carving colossal figures out of 
 the rocks while he waited, might be taken 
 as a symbol of his art. 
 
 As for that vast monument of Papal vain- 
 glory, the design for which comprised near 
 fifty figures, its history needs no re-telling. 
 It is well known how for ten years Julius, the 
 bluff, choleric, generous old tyrant, bent on 
 regaining the States of the Church, in turn 
 cajoled and rated the artist — the only man 
 whose will was stronger than his own. One 
 hour it was fisticuffs, another ducats; after 
 the insults, Michael Angelo generally set out 
 for Florence and had to be won back again. 
 But the Pope loved his great victim, even 
 while he tormented him. One day when 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 119 
 
 Buonarotti had turned the tables, a Bishop, 
 standing by, excused him as an ignorant 
 artist. " 'Tis thou who art the ignoramus 
 with thy impertinences . . . get out of my 
 sight and be hanged to thee ! " cried JuHus, 
 and the Bishop was hustled out of the room. 
 The explosive admiration' of Julius was no 
 light matter, and his surprise visits to the 
 sculptor, and the bridge that he had built to 
 make them easier between the Castel San 
 Angelo and the workshop, were doubtful 
 blessings to Buonarotti. , After endless dally- 
 ings, and when the Piazza was crowded with 
 blocks of marble, the work was cut short by 
 the plots of Bramante, the omnipotent archi- 
 tect, the designer of the new St. Peter's. 
 This noble adapter of classic principles to 
 modern requirements, this master of space 
 and of austere simplicity, justly wielded great 
 sway in Rome. Jealous of the reputation of 
 his idol, Raphael, he persuaded Julius to give 
 up his expensive scheme and to commission 
 Michael Angelo to paint his Chapel — a sure 
 means, it seemed, of proving the pre-eminence 
 of Raphael. The result was the miracle of 
 the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, achieved in 
 the teetK of every hardship : of damp, of bad 
 
120 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 apprentices, of the furies of the Pope, who 
 rushed in, so impatient to see it that he shook 
 down showers of dust from the scaffolding. 
 
 Of the fated Tomb, once more resumed, 
 again given up, Httle was completed except 
 the majestic Moses, the Law-giver, the friend 
 of God, as Angelo conceived him. The 
 effect was amazing, not alone upon Pagan 
 Christians. " The Jews," says a witness, 
 " are to be seen every Saturday, their Sabbath, 
 hurrying like a flight of swallows, men and 
 women . . to worship this figure." For us 
 it embodies the strange friendship of two 
 human beings, so diverse as almost to seem 
 hostile, yet both so simple and direct that 
 they could forget Pope and vassal and under- 
 stand one another as men. With Leo X, 
 the vacillating diplomat, whose splendid love 
 of art obliterates his lack of imagination, 
 whose exotic magnificence seems to be summed 
 up in his strange collection of ape and elephant, 
 of chameleon and civet cat, Buonarotti could 
 form no such intimacy unless it were at rare 
 moments, when Leo sat listening to music, 
 rapt, his head sunk upon his breast ; or when 
 he went hunting " without a ^ole," in 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 121 
 
 spectacles and top-boots, to the dismay of Jiis 
 Master of the Ceremonies. " The which," 
 said this official, " is quite improper^ for no 
 one can kiss his feet." 
 
 Yet the remaining great works of Michael 
 Angelo's brush and chisel were due to a Medici, 
 Leo's cousin, Pope Clement VII (1523-1534). 
 He it was who ordered the great tomb of the 
 Medici at Floi> ence, as well as the New Sacristy 
 to enshrine it; who thus gave us the monu- 
 ment of his cousin Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, 
 and of Giuliano 's nephew, Lorenzo of Urbino ; 
 he, also, who commissioned Buonarotti to 
 paint the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. 
 The master's later outlook upon life, deep- 
 hearted, sorrowful, victorious, is expressed in 
 the figures of those marble princes, brooding 
 eternally over the recumbent forms of Night 
 and Morning, Dawn and Twilight, whose 
 every lineament is charged with the stress 
 and suffering of man, and the force of soul 
 by which he dominates them. It was an 
 outlook which gave voice to all his grief for 
 his dear Florence and her loss of liberty, 
 after the siege by the Imperial Army in 
 1529, that blockade during which he proved 
 
122 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 himself a past-master in the science of fortifi- 
 cation. But it gave voice to something larger 
 and more enduring — to a feeling for the misery 
 of the world such as needs no transposing of 
 our thought, but strikes the first modern note 
 in sculpture and moves us as if it were of 
 to-day. 
 
 The "Last Judgment" — an incredible 
 achievement of brush, and of dramatic imag- 
 ination, free from all bonds of tradition — also 
 struck a new and daring note, in spite of its 
 well-worn theme. The picture absorbed him 
 for eight years, and it was not completed until 
 the time of the next Pope, Paul III. In his 
 reign, too, Michael Angelo, the architect of the 
 New Sacristy and of the Laurentian Library 
 in Florence, at length succeeded the great 
 designers, Raphael, Bramante, and Antonio 
 Sangallo (the younger), as Director of the 
 Works at St. Peter's. The rebuilding of that 
 Church had first been decreed by Julius II, at 
 the zenith of his pride, that it might make a 
 fitting temple for his tomb. It became the 
 centre of architects' feuds. Michael Angelo 
 undertook the heavy task, but refused any 
 payment; he would, he said, take no recom- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 123 
 
 pense for work done for the love of God and 
 the Apostle. For thirty years, worn by age and 
 harried by the miserable plots of Sangallo's 
 party, he slaved at his vast design, developing 
 Bramante's earlier scheme, transforming it, 
 making it his own; in the end evoking the 
 famous dome, still unfinished at the time of 
 his death. 
 
 His age was as strenuous as his youth. 
 We always have the same picture of him: 
 the shortish man with the broken nose, and 
 the square brow with its seven strongly 
 marked lines, working with the hand of a 
 master and the heart of a humble pupil 
 taught of God; labouring by night as by 
 day, a candle stuck in his pasteboard cap to 
 leave his hands free, and upon his legs leather 
 gaiters which he seldom found time to take 
 off. Never was great artist so pure — a 
 marvel in that age of impurity; and never 
 was one so unworldly attended by such 
 immediate success. The way in which his 
 goodness was recognized, as well as his genius, 
 speaks for the responsive spark still alive 
 somewhere in the Vatican. Princes uncovered 
 before him, all nine Popes were equally his 
 
124 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 friends. Once he exclaimed to Julius III 
 that if his soul did not gain by the trials that 
 beset his art, his endeavour was lost. The 
 Pope put his hands upon his shoulders. " You 
 will be a gainer — in soul and body, never 
 doubt it," said he. ^ 
 
 He was always surrounded by adoring 
 friends : his devoted Vasari, to whom he 
 wrote daily when he was absent, Cardinal 
 Pole, Sebastiano del Piombo ; and by a crowd 
 of disturbing acquaintance, from the Pope's 
 busybody Chamberlain, whom he nicknamed 
 Tantecose, to the poorest art-student in Rome. 
 If we could count their number we should 
 stand the more amazed at his output, and 
 better compute what was suffered by this 
 seeker of solitude. 
 
 Michael Angelo was loved because he was 
 supremely lovable — for his faults, his vol- 
 canic rages and indiscretions, as much as for 
 his virtues. And also because he loved — ^not 
 only in order to please himself, but with stead- 
 fast piety. His brother died of the plague 
 in his arms; he was uniformly kind to his 
 quarrelsome old father, and generous to his 
 scapegrace nephew and his other relations. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 125 
 
 He alone nursed his dying servant, Urbino, 
 day and night, and lavished his masterpieces 
 as gifts upon him and his fellows. ^ 
 
 He never married. " I have only too much 
 of a wife in my art, she has given me trouble 
 enough," he said. But he knew one great 
 love in his life — his feeling for Vittoria 
 Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, a feeling amply 
 returned and as unique as the rest of him. 
 It was the love of the star for the star — 
 Platonic in the deepest sense — fired with the 
 search after God and after ideal beauty. And 
 it inspired his beautiful poems, themselves 
 enough to perpetuate his name. " I have 
 often," says Condi vi, " heard Michael Angelo 
 discourse of love. . . . For myself, I do not 
 know what Plato says thereof, but I know well 
 that I, who have known Michael Angelo so 
 long and so intimately, have never heard issue 
 from his mouth any but the most honest of 
 words — such as had power to extinguish in 
 youth every ill-governed desire." 
 
 Vittoria Colonna was worthy of him. Her- 
 self a poet as well as a great lady, she was 
 also imbued with Plato and the new religion, 
 was a guiding spirit of the group that wished to 
 
126 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 reconcile the ancient and the modern. She 
 was forty-eight, he sixty-four, when they 
 first met. She gave him his best hours of 
 recreation. For his benefit she initiated a 
 httle society of four, which met in church or 
 garden to talk on art and other intellectual 
 matters. "As we entered," writes one of 
 its members, " Michael Angelo and Messer 
 Lsetantio were coming out . c . to take their 
 siesta under the trees by the running water* 
 We sat down on a stone bench in the garden 
 at the foot of some laurels, and we were very 
 comfortable leaning back against the green 
 ivy which covered the wall, and thence we 
 could see a good part of the city, very graceful 
 and full of ancient majesty." On one occasion 
 they discussed painting all day, and Michael 
 Angelo begged to spend the night in like 
 fashion. His thoughts jut out beyond those 
 of the rest, like rocks, into the sea of thought 
 and feeling. " What barbarian is there," he 
 asks, " who cannot understand that the foot 
 of a man is nobler than his shoe " ? "A bad 
 painter neither can nor knows how to imagine." 
 In these two phrases lies the whole of his 
 artist's creed. " One," he says elsewhere. 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME 127 
 
 " who works in the traces of others is but 
 poorly able to make good use of them." And 
 even more than lack of originality, he con- 
 demned what he called " genius without 
 judgment." He stands for the sanity of 
 genius. 
 
 Vittoria's picture was one of the only two 
 portraits that he would paint. She died 
 before him. " And I have often heard him 
 say," records Condi vi, " that nothing grieved 
 him so much as that, when he went to see her 
 after she passed away from his life, he did not 
 kiss her on the brow ... as he did kiss her 
 hand." 
 
 He lived for nineteen years after her, and 
 towards the end he devoted his brush chiefly 
 to the subject of the Crucifixion, so often 
 drawn by him for his lady. " I am so old," 
 he said, " that Death constantly pulls me by 
 the cape. ... If it be possible to carve 
 statues or to paint in the other life, I shall 
 not fail to do so there, where there is no more 
 growing old." 
 
 He has not failed to go on working here, 
 where few great artists have existed since 
 his day who have not felt his influence. If 
 
128 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Michael Angelo, sculptor, painter, architect, 
 engineer, poet, set, as it were, the final seal 
 upon the Renaissance, he also went beyond it 
 and found that inner world which is our 
 heritage. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE AND THE 
 WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 The Renaissance made an epoch for women ; 
 it gave them a new field and a new importance. 
 Its appeal to beauty, its quick social develop- 
 ments, the emotional energies and the varied 
 activities that it involved, were peculiarly- 
 suited to their powers; and their frequent 
 discussions in loggia or lemon grove about 
 love and friendship, with all their analysis 
 and nice distinctions between the " love for 
 collective humanity, for irrational objects, for 
 t'he Great -All; . . . for the Angels," though 
 they were little more than metaphysical 
 babble, were yet so finely adapted to feminine 
 intuition that they brought women into 
 society, not as queens of chivalry, but as 
 companions. Nor were women, with their 
 need for expression, slow to make intercourse 
 into an art. They did for life what painting, 
 sculpture, poetry had effected for beauty and 
 
 I 129 
 
130 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 ideas ; they were its interpreters. They stand, 
 as it were, a race apart, independent of their 
 several nationahties, with the same defects 
 and quahties, the same outlook, recognizing 
 their family likeness and holding corre- 
 spondence with each other throughout Europe. 
 Alike they were full of exuberant energy and 
 curiosity; alike they showed a kind of naive 
 maturity, a paradoxical blending of art and 
 instinct. Large, sunny, graceful, with a 
 golden opinion of themselves and of others, 
 to them everything seemed worth while. 
 
 They danced, they sang, they commanded 
 troops, they read Virgil and Cicero and Greek 
 philosophy, they brought up large families, 
 they wrote treatises, they planned dresses, 
 they governed provinces. They were brilli- 
 antly efficient; they went far, but they did 
 not go deep. 
 
 Appreciative they were, but not discrim- 
 inating; all their pedagogues were Apollos, 
 and they had not that central warmth in 
 themselves which would have made them feel 
 the inadequacy of the academic spirit. Their 
 largeness was, indeed, not a little like that of 
 their cool unfurnished marble rooms ; dignity 
 and courage were their virtues rather than 
 
WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 131 
 
 sensitiveness or humility, and they often 
 showed the heartlessness of an untiring vitahty 
 intent upon its ends. Their education, the 
 same as that of their brothers with whom 
 they were sometimes brought up, was hardly 
 a softening process. But it braced their 
 bodies, and their amazing health was largely 
 owing to their simple external view of life 
 which kept them young and made grief 
 appear a waste of time. Such an attitude was 
 disastrous in many ways. The noblest issues 
 of life were shut to them, their religion was 
 a matter of observance and etiquette. The 
 women of a country are in great measure the 
 indicators of its faith, and had those of Italy 
 been more spiritual, the Reformation might 
 have taken root there. Vittoria Colonna, 
 with her spiritual fervour, her persistent grief 
 for her dead husband, her profound affection 
 for Michael Angelo, was the exception, and 
 she stands out in contrast to the rest of them. 
 There was Emilia Pia, from whom Shake- 
 speare might have drawn his Beatrice — the 
 life and light of the court at Urbino, " mais- 
 tresse and ringleader of all the companye so 
 that every manne at her received under- 
 standinge and courage " — " Madonna Emilia " 
 
132 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 who, as she lay dying, recited passages from 
 11 Cortegiano, that record of her happy prime. 
 There were GiuHa Gonzaga and the Venetian, 
 Veronica Gambara, the busy goddesses of 
 a daring intellectual coterie; and Marietta 
 Strozzi, with the tip -tilted nose and dancing 
 eyes, who at eighteen broke away from her 
 guardians and lived alone, and had snowball 
 matches by moonlight with all the sparks of 
 Florence; and Olympia Morata, who at six- 
 teen lectured in Ferrara on philosophy, and 
 shone with equal lustre as a critic of poets or a 
 translator of the Bible ; yet left her acclaiming 
 country to become the wife of a Lutheran 
 doctor, and died, worn out, in Heidelberg. 
 
 The Estes and Gonzagas furnished the most 
 complete types — in Isabella d'Este, wife of 
 Francesco Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, " the 
 first lady of the world," as men called her, 
 and in her sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, 
 wife of Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino. Isabella 
 stood for the Renaissance Lady, Elisabetta 
 for Renaissance society. Beatrice d'Este, the 
 wife of Ludovico Sforza, was as representative 
 as her sister, with her gifts and her graces, 
 her missals and jewels and painted clavichords ; 
 but she died at twenty-one and only flashed 
 
WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 133 
 
 across the mortal horizon, while Isabella lived 
 to old age, and lived each minute. There 
 is something unreasonably refreshing, and 
 something brutal about her insistent enjoy- 
 ment, her benevolence and her selfishness, her 
 diplomacy and her density. What woman 
 of another day would send her dwarf as con- 
 solation to a heartbroken widower, or bargain 
 with a poverty-stricken artist ? Yet she was 
 generous and free from egoism; a splendid 
 Patron in an age of Patrons. 
 
 As connoisseur indeed and as collector she 
 stands foremost among these extravagant, 
 fastidious, matter-of-fact lovers of the beauti- 
 ful. They played the game more artfully than 
 men, using their delicate artillery — ^their wits 
 and wiles, their good taste and petty passions — 
 to gain their desires. But a game it remained. 
 For although they lived amidst great artists and 
 great traditions of beauty, although Mantegna 
 painted Isabella's " Camera Degli Sposi," 
 while his " Parnassus " and his " Defeat of 
 the Vices " hung in her " Studio " not far from 
 Bellini's glowing canvas and Michael Angelo's 
 " Sleeping Cupid," these ladies were at heart 
 not very different from the rich ladies of to- 
 day. With a real enthusiasm for art, they 
 
134 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 were driven^ by common human instincts, 
 Isabella's greatest enjoyment was to be 
 different from her neighbours, to possess some- 
 thing they could not get. To her it was 
 unendurable to hear of any rarity without 
 attempting to have it copied. She and 
 Lucrezia Borgia grew sharp in competition 
 over their antiques, and to emulate Isabella's 
 finest piece, Lucrezia bought a modern 
 " Cupid," which she exhibited as an old one. 
 Such a stroke would have qualified her for a 
 dealer, but good dealers make indifferent 
 artists. - - , . . ' 
 
 Her great friend, Elisabetta Gonzaga, was 
 more truly intellectual and more pensive. 
 She remains as the immortal hostess of 
 Castiglione's Cortegiano, that living picture 
 of the literary little court of Guidobaldo, Duke 
 of Urbino; the modem hostess, who effaces 
 herself to draw out others, to fuse conflicting 
 elements, to give zest and to restrain. . And 
 she was helped by her husband, the subtler 
 version of his great father, Federigo; the 
 delicate Stoic who, crippled by gout at twenty, 
 triumphed over bodily torments through mind 
 and will, and through a kind of native 
 sweetness. His illness, throwing him upon 
 
WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 135 
 
 intellectual interests and the pleasures of good 
 talk, did much to ripen the art of conversation 
 and to make his circle what it was — ^the 
 flower of civilized Italian society. 
 
 That circle was illumined by the wit and the 
 scholarship of Bembo and by the thoughtful 
 urbanity of Castiglione. Bibbiena talked his 
 best for such an audience, and Aretino, the 
 '"'' unico Aretino,'*^ unique as genius and as 
 scamp, electrified it by his improvisingSc 
 Every man or woman of repute in Italy, every 
 traveller of distinction joined it. They made 
 no high-flown experiments, and would have 
 laughed at the six ladies and six gentlemen of 
 Florence who retired to the hills to get seclu- 
 sion for intellectual discussion and returned 
 less detached than they came. The group of 
 people who gathered roimd their Duke and 
 Duchess sincerely cared for things of the mind. 
 " It appeared," says Castiglione, " that there 
 was a chaine that kept all lincked together in 
 love in suche wise that there was never 
 agrement of wyll or hearty love greater 
 betweene brethren, than was there betweene 
 us all." 
 
 The significance of the little company was 
 deeper than it appeared c It marked another 
 
136 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 stage in the growth of social ideals and of 
 the position of women, " With them we had 
 such free and honest conversation that every 
 manne might commune, sit daily and laugh 
 with whom he had lusted. But suchwas the 
 respect we bore to the Dutchess's will that the 
 self-same liberty was a very great bridle." 
 In those last words is laid the foundation- 
 stone of modern intercourse. 
 
 Castiglione was the champion of women, 
 and his book is perhaps the first self-conscious 
 statement of their claims; of the age -worn 
 questions as to what woman should be, 
 whether she should spin or think, what is her 
 true relation to man. Such were the topics 
 discussed by these lords and ladies ; and there 
 were others no less involved in their central 
 subject — ^the fashioning of the perfect Courtier: 
 such minor themes, for instance, as " Some 
 born very asseheds," or " Tumblynge not fit 
 for a gentleman." 
 
 Every sort of disputant was there, from the 
 courtly idealist, Giuliano de' Medici, to the 
 ribald Aretino who thought that woman was 
 " a perfect meremaiden." But the enduring 
 laurels were awarded to Bembo and Castig- 
 lione; and if more hyperbole was lavished 
 
WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 137 
 
 upon Bembo, it is Baldassare Castiglione 
 (1478-1579) whose charm has outhved them 
 all — Baldassare, born of Gonzaga blood, the 
 chosen friend of Raphael, equally man of 
 the world and man of letters, acclaimed as 
 the perfect gentleman who thought that good 
 breeding implied the absence of pedantry, not 
 only in behaviour but in style. " Style," he 
 said, " is a manner of speache that remaineth 
 after a man hath spoken — the Hfe of the 
 woordes," and he, like Bembo, espoused the 
 cause of the Italian language : " like unto a 
 delicious garden " . . . " even if it be not 
 Tuscan of the purest water." It is not sur- 
 prising that Castiglione suited Raphael's 
 brush so well that the painter made of Baldas- 
 sare's portrait one of his great masterpieces. 
 For Baldassare had a Raphaelesque nature; 
 he practised the art of balance so finely that 
 he turned it into harmony. He was the 
 paragon of ambassadors, in Rome, in Spain, 
 in England, whence he brought back the 
 Garter to Guidobaldo. His suavity, his cour- 
 teous wit and tempered will are alive for us 
 still in the face that Raphael drew — in the 
 kind of brilliant sobriety of the blacks and 
 greys of the picture. 
 
138 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 And Castiglione lives also in the great hall 
 of the mountain Palace at Urbino, with its 
 vaulted ceiling and rich chimney -mantel and 
 its doors inlaid with dancing Arts and Sciences, 
 Here the last talk that he records of the noble 
 company took place, that wonderful talk that 
 lasted till dawn — ^upon Beauty, " spoil of the 
 victorye of the soul " ; and upon the senses, 
 " the passage " thereunto ; and upon Love 
 sacred and profane, the " meane betwixt 
 thinges heavenlye and earthlye," the spirit 
 whom Bembo invokes in a hymn of ecstasy. 
 Day broke. " Then everie man arose upon 
 his feete with much wonder . . . and not one 
 of them felt any heavinesse of slepe. . . . 
 When the windows then were opened on the 
 side of the Palaice that hath his prospect 
 towards the high top of Mount Catri, they 
 sawe alreadye risen in the East a fairemominge 
 like unto the coleur of roses and all starres 
 voided, saving onely . . . Venus, from which 
 appeered to blowe a sweete blast, that, filling 
 the air with a b5i:inge cold, began to quicken 
 the tunable notes of the pretty birdes among 
 the hushing woods of the hills at hande. 
 Whereupon they all, taking their leave with 
 
WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 139 
 
 reverence of the Dutchesse, departed toward 
 their lodgings without torche, the Hght of the 
 day sufficing." 
 
 They file before us, a last pageant, doing 
 obeisance to the genius of the Renaissance. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CYNICS AND THE SWASHBUCKLERS 
 OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 I. Macchiavelli and The Prince 
 
 It seems no far cry from the making of the 
 perfect Courtier to the making of the perf-ect 
 Prince, but there is a gulf fixed between the 
 minds of the authors who fashioned these 
 types. Baldassare Castiglione was the soul of 
 romance; Niccolo Macchiavelli (1469-1527) 
 was the spirit of cynicism — not of that sore 
 cynicism which comes of disillusion, but of 
 the cheerful inborn sort which takes men at 
 their lowest and makes the best of it. He 
 was the child of the old age of the Renais- 
 sance, the worst qualities of which were 
 epitomized in his philosophy. But we must 
 not confound the man with his thought. His 
 thought only summed up the wisdom of 
 current political ideas, the conceptions of men 
 who put prudence in the place of wisdom 
 
 and sacrificed themselves for self-interest. 
 
 140 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 141 
 
 His life was better than that of many of his 
 neighbours. 
 
 Macehiavelli came of a good, civic Tuscan 
 family, he filled civic posts, he went on em- 
 bassies at home and abroad; he was an im- 
 portant pioneer as well as an author, for he 
 iiastituted a National Militia of his country- 
 men and was the Secretary of its organizing 
 board. When, in 1494, the Medici were 
 expelled from Florence, he held a post in the 
 anti-Medicean Government, and was disgraced 
 on their return (1512). Suspected of con- 
 spiracy and imprisoned, he was ere long 
 released and allowed to retire to his farm at 
 Casciano, where, in 1514, he began The 
 Prince, To analyze his lessons in statecraft 
 would be to work out all the casuistries of 
 Macchiavellism, that intricate system of engin- 
 eering which would, if logically carried out, 
 set up the Kingdom of Lucifer — not the fiery 
 rebel of Milton, but Goethe's cold and polished 
 Mephistopheles, the conqueror by indifference. 
 The important point about a man is what he 
 believes, not what he disbelieves. On that 
 his real influence is founded, and Macehiavelli 
 was no exception. He was too much a man 
 of the Renaissance to be wholly negative; 
 
142 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and he had a unique ideal, no inconsistent one. 
 That ideal was Cesare Borgia. In his eyes 
 Cesare embodied success and power, and 
 power was Macchiavelli's God. The policy he 
 evolved in its name survives by virtue of this 
 conviction. ^ Strong empire was his aim for his 
 Prince, the establishment of a dominant State ; 
 for this end, all means — vice, crime, cruelty, 
 falsehood— were justifiable, while scruples 
 were but the follies of a milksop. There is 
 even a kind of sincerity in his expressing' and 
 regulating the notions by which men were 
 then living. He attempted to form a system 
 of lawlessness which at least provided a code 
 of rules in the place of arbitrary action. No 
 Jesuit could have been more heart-whole in 
 his zeal for man's personal salvation than was 
 Macchiavelli in the pursuit of his object. It 
 was no nascent dream of Liberalism, but the 
 natural outcome of his conception, his need 
 for consolidation and extension, that made 
 him desire a unified Italy. He realized that 
 the fulfilment of this desire could alone make 
 his country into an important force, and in 
 this realization there was unfeigned patriotism. 
 But with a hawk's eyesight, he had no insight, 
 and he could not.see.that no permanent result 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 143 
 
 could ever be gained on the motives he pro- 
 vided. He left out the soul. There is, perhaps, 
 no better object lesson in political philosophy 
 than to confront Macchiavelli with Mazzini. 
 
 Macchiavelli is generally regarded as the first 
 great exponent of expediency; he gave to 
 unauthorized coin the stamp of the mint — he 
 bade men render unto Caesar the things that 
 are not Caesar's. He let fall political maxims 
 that are admirable so long as they are taken 
 ephemerally, not as permanent truth. Yet 
 his main significance for his generation was 
 moral, not political. It lay in the model that 
 he set up for imitation. What could be ex- 
 pected of the age that was nourished upon the 
 example of Cesare Borgia, the perfect Bravo, 
 the artist in murder, whose mind was formed 
 upon stories of the scoundrel gods of Rome 
 and Greece as well as upon those of classic 
 conquerors ? The fact that such an ideal was 
 practicable is at once a symptom and a cause. 
 The creed of Macchiavelli is explained by con- 
 temporary scamps like Aretino and Cellini; 
 it also helped to mould these sanguine cynics 
 and make them possible to themselves. 
 Macchiavelli evoked a school of men who were 
 at least not the cowards of conscience, a school 
 
144 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 that did not die with him; and perhaps his 
 most illustrious disciple, as indifferent and 
 a-moral as hims.elf, was Catherine de' Medici. 
 Such was the effect of The Prince, The 
 book was dedicated to Giuliano, Duke of 
 Nemours. It immortalized Cesare Borgia. 
 
 Macchiavelli's contribution to literature was 
 better than his contribution to ethics. His 
 rich and lucid prose, discarding the decorations 
 of the Renaissance, only caring to say what 
 there was to say in the most direct manner, 
 marked a stride in the progress of literary 
 methods. And this was an honour he shared 
 with Guicciardini (1482-1540), whose two chief 
 works, the Istoria d^ Italia (from 1378 onwards) 
 and the Istoria Fiorentina, no longer naif like 
 their predecessors, but fertile in practical 
 reflections, already belong to modern days. 
 Guicciardini, like Macchiavelli, " loved his 
 country better than his own soul," and drew 
 a dividing line between public and private 
 morality. Both these men used the classics 
 as the source from which to illustrate their 
 precepts. ,The student was, indeed, the better 
 part of Macchiavelli ; his love of books dignified 
 his enforced retirement. 
 
 " When evening falls," runs one of his 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 145 
 
 letters, " I go home and enter my writing- 
 room. On the threshold I put off my country 
 habit, filthy with mud and mire, and array 
 myself in royal and courtly garments; thus 
 worthily attired, I make my entrance into the 
 ancient courts of the men of old, where they 
 receive me with love, and where I feed upon 
 that food, which only is my own and for which 
 I was born. I feel no shame in conversing 
 with them and asking them the reasons of 
 their actions. They, moved by their humanity, 
 make answer; for four hours' space I feel no 
 annoyance, forget all care; poverty cannot 
 frighten, nor death appal me — I am carried 
 away to their society." 
 
 It was not only the mud of the fields that 
 Macchiavelli threw off in his study. 
 
 II. Venice and Pietro Aretino 
 
 Venice was the right setting for Pietro 
 Aretino, the jolly prince of ruffians. The 
 conditions of Venice were peculiar to itself 
 and especially fitted to provide him with a 
 copious education for his faculties. For 
 Venice with her own laws, customs, traditions, 
 her boast of exemption from Papal authority. 
 
146 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 her trade with the East, and her enormous 
 wealth, which, like her isolating lagoons, 
 fortified her independence, was alike the home 
 of beauty and of licence. The constant con- 
 tact with Orientals was not without effect 
 on her morals, and the splendour of her de- 
 baucheries was unrivalled. It is characteristic 
 that the most intellectual woman in the Venice 
 of Aretino's day was Veronica Franco, the 
 famous courtesan, who, like so many of her com- 
 peers, held a court like that of a queen. As 
 far as art went, also, the city stood alone. In 
 other places painting, sculpture, architecture, 
 reached their zenith and then gradually de- 
 generated. But in Venice there were not two 
 stages of the Renaissance, there were two 
 separate Renaissances. And though Bellini, 
 the leader of the first Renaissance, could boast 
 that Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, the leaders 
 of the second, had studied with him in their 
 youth and that he had schooled their brushes, 
 the fact remains that he did not permanently 
 affect their minds or their styles, and they 
 developed on other lines from him. The two 
 generations kept distinct. There was the 
 nobler time, contemporaneous with the move- 
 ment elsewhere in Italy, the great period of 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 147 
 
 the Bellinis and Vivarinis, and of lesser lights 
 like Cima and Catena, when form was infused 
 with faith and such painters as existed — few 
 in comparison with those of other cities — bore 
 witness to the purer public morals of the 
 earlier part of the fifteenth century. There 
 was the season of transition, marked by no 
 other names so eminent as those of Carpaccio 
 and Crivelli, and there was the wonderful 
 flowering time — ^the burst of a summer that 
 knew no spring — ^the day which brought forth 
 Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese, and 
 their surrounding galaxy — Bonifazio, Palma 
 Vecchio, Pordenone, Previtale and the rest. 
 There was nothing like it for sudden fertility, 
 excepting the circle of Elizabethan poets and 
 dramatists then flourishing in England. 
 
 In Venice these great men were of the same 
 time as the decadent artists in the rest of 
 Italy ; the external view, the materialism that 
 produced decay elsewhere, struck the note 
 best suited to the sensuous Venetians and 
 drew from them the art that was most truly 
 theirs. The outside of life absorbed their 
 more inward qualities. 
 
 They have painted the passionate poetry of 
 the world and the flesh, the emotion of splen- 
 
148 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 dour, as it were the soul of the body. And 
 they were the first personal landscape-painters, 
 the first to imbue Nature with passion and, 
 even where she was but a background, to lend 
 her a life of her own. Raphael was the master 
 of space; Piero della Francesca invested tree 
 and mountain with a kind of drama caught 
 from his subject; but the landscape of the 
 Venetians, above all, that of Giorgione, is 
 complete and self-dependent. That, inspired 
 as they were by sky and water, they also 
 stand as the greatest colorists the world had 
 seen, need hardly be reiterated. 
 
 It is enlightening to contrast these men of 
 Venice with their Tuscan contemporaries ; it 
 brings out the deep difference between the 
 two. For meanwhile in Florence, Andrea del 
 Sarto (1460-1529), "the faultless painter," 
 was making for much the same end with his 
 Madonna del Sacco and his soft, luscious saints 
 and Virgins. But the external view did not 
 suit Florence. Even he failed to wrest from 
 outward show the vital warmth that makes 
 it endure, while his pupils, Pontormo and 
 Bronzino, only rendered its matter-of-factness. 
 And Siena was in like case. Sodoma and his 
 group, discarding the old Sienese mysticism, 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 149 
 
 replaced it by sentimentality, and became 
 sensational where a Tintoret was dramatic. 
 
 It is easier than in the case of other schools 
 to speak of the later Venetians collectively — 
 as easy as to mass together the Greek sculp- 
 tors of the best period. The words Tuscan 
 and Umbrian cover a far greater wealth of 
 individual thought and fancy. To see as far 
 as possible into the world of sense is a glorious 
 but a simplifying power, and these artists of 
 Venice show uniformity. Yet each has his 
 own peculiar properties. Giorgione, who most 
 intensely sums up the best qualities of all and 
 transcends them, is their poet, their Keats, 
 who plucks the heart of sadness out of beauty. 
 Tintoret was the genius of a great romantic 
 drama; Veronese of a great romantic prose; 
 while Titian was perhaps the most fertile, the 
 best equipped at all points ; like Giorgione, the 
 representative of his compeers, but the most 
 proportionate rather than the most fervid. 
 
 These great mundane painters made an 
 exciting drama of Biblical subjects. They 
 seldom represented their Holy Families even 
 in a stable, they set them down in large 
 luminous landscapes. Tintoret's " Cruci- 
 fixion," his " Day of Judgment," are elemental 
 
150 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 tragedies; the "Marriage of Cana " is the 
 cHmax of a love-story; his frescoes in the 
 school of San Rocco are so many acts in a 
 big play. And Veronese is a master of scene- 
 painting. Sublimated fact, the doings of 
 gods and goddesses, the idylls of pleasure in 
 its prime furnish the themes best adapted 
 to them. What can more fitly show their 
 glories than Giorgione's " Pastoral " in the 
 Louvre, with its noontide blaze of youth 
 and love, its piping shepherd and its poignant 
 sense of mortality grafted upon a beauty as 
 simple as that conceived by any Greek ? But 
 there is no reminiscence here of Greek philo- 
 sophy, no Neo-Platonism. And the portraits 
 of Tintoret's doges, or of Titian's nobles, and 
 his ladies with red-gold hair, tell the same tale. 
 No less than the subject pictures do they 
 seem to point to a truth; they go to prove 
 that the peculiar qualities of Venice are most 
 adequately expressed by the art of painting. 
 As we look at them, we understand why 
 Venetian sculpture reached no pre-eminence — 
 why the marbles of the Saiisovinos leave us 
 cold, and the only important work in Venice 
 is the Tuscan Verrocchio's equestrian statue 
 of Colleoni. 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 151 
 
 The free use of the senses which evoked 
 such admirable aesthetics could not be so 
 successful in conduct ; it lent itself to licence 
 and corruption. It was the natural parent 
 of Pietro Aretino, scoundrel, good soul, genius, 
 writer, improvisatore, tavern brawler, fine 
 gentleman ; the master of eloquence, the soul 
 of dishonour, whose fascinations were so 
 compelling that they made Michael Angelo 
 a suppliant for his kindness and Titian his 
 intimate friend ; whose crimes were so notori- 
 ous that when Tintoret was painting his 
 portrait, he took his measurements with an 
 admonitory cutlass for a mahlstick. When 
 we ask why these choice spirits courted him, 
 and why, what is still more remarkable, 
 Elisabetta feted him at Urbino, there is one 
 answer, and that is, " greatness." He was a 
 complete type — a scamp in the grand style; 
 he had the fiery force of genius. And his wit 
 was irresistible. " Nature, of whose sim- 
 plicity I am the secretary, dictates," he says, 
 '* that which I set down." Did he help Shake- 
 speare to create Falstaff ? He may at all 
 events have been the progenitor of future 
 Scapins and Figaros. He was also, instinc- 
 tively, an artist. After watching a sunset 
 
152 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 over Venice — " I," he wrote to Titian, " who 
 know that your pencil is the spirit of her 
 inmost soul, cried aloud, ' Oh, Titian, where 
 are you now ? ' " 
 
 His birth, at Arezzo, was like himself. The 
 son of a noble and of a woman of the streets, 
 he was " born," as he says, " in a hospital, 
 with the spirit of a king." He began life as a 
 bookbinder at Perugia — ^the one respectable 
 moment in his career — ^and after that he was 
 most things, a monk, a footman, a grand 
 Signor, toadied by ambassadors and kings. 
 Charles V wished to knight him and there was 
 talk of getting him a Cardinal's hat, for which 
 his real flair for art, or his denunciation of 
 " that arch-pedant Luther " would about 
 equally have fitted him. It is a comfort to 
 know that the English Ambassador at Venice 
 thrashed him; otherwise he prospered to the 
 end, and died, says tradition, whilst laughing 
 at an indecent joke. 
 
 III. Benvenuto Cellini 
 
 Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1572) belonged to 
 the same race of swashbucklers. But Ben- 
 venuto was always a unique artist and never 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 153 
 
 even temporarily, a gentleman, nor could he 
 have figured in the conversational circle at 
 Urbino. His career lay mainly in Rome, but 
 his greatest triumph was at Florence. 
 
 " Now as it pleased my glorious Lord, the 
 immortal Gk)d," he wrote, " I brought the 
 Perseus at last to its end; and on Thursday 
 morning, I showed it openly to the whole 
 city. No sooner had I removed the screen, 
 though the sun was barely risen, than a great 
 number of people gathered round, and all 
 with one voice strove who should laud it 
 highest. The Duke stood at one of the lower 
 windows of the Palace . . . and there, half- 
 hidden ... he heard every word said about 
 the statue." 
 
 This was the public to which Benvenuto 
 was accustomed. We of to-day are not so 
 much excited about him, yet his elegant, 
 highly accomplished Perseus still displays its 
 graces on the Loggia dei Lanzi, and still 
 proves the goldsmith-sculptor, Cellini, a sove- 
 reign in his own province. His was a small 
 art, revelling in details — the art of decadence 
 which yet kept the enjoyment of the prime. 
 This is the attraction of nearly all his work; 
 of his figures, his jewels, his golden salt-cellars 
 
154 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 formed of Neptimes, Nereids, dolphins, or his 
 richly carved ciboria. Cellini knew how to 
 dominate his detail, he was the master- 
 craftsman of ornament ; and although he had 
 more ingenuity than imagination, more re- 
 source than strength, he did not let art de- 
 generate into artifice. Nor did he repeat 
 himself. His fertility was incredible ; even 
 he could not have exaggerated it. . 
 
 The most enduring monument of himself is 
 his amazing autobiography, the frankest and 
 most mendacious of histories. Benvenuto, 
 like Aretino, was " Nature's secretary," but 
 much more of a writer than was Pietro. He 
 takes up his indefatigable brush and with 
 vivid splashes of colour paints for us, first a 
 portrait of himself, a good deal larger than 
 life-size, and then broad adventurous pictures 
 of every one he has met, from Michael Angelo 
 and Clement VII to the wayside tramp, and 
 the fat French judge before whom he came in 
 Paris. Seldom has there been such a bragga- 
 docio. If Aretino is the prince of ruffians, 
 Benvenuto is the prince of liars. He lies 
 royally, generously, for the joy of lying. His 
 lies, like his work, are rich in ingenuity and 
 design, in arabesques and flourishes. He 
 
CYNICS AND SWASHBUCKLERS 155 
 
 brawled, he cheated, he murdered — ^not quite 
 so many men as he believed. But he was bad 
 enough. To have fired the shot which (so he 
 says) killed the Connetable de Bourbon in the 
 sack of Rome, was perhaps the best deed of 
 his existence. Yet he almost wrote himself 
 down a saint. A halo, he tells us, only visible 
 at morning and evening, appeared round his 
 head. When he escaped from the hands of 
 justice, it proved to him that God was on his 
 side, and it is surprising that his record does 
 not end with an account of his ascent to heaven 
 in a chariot of fire which he could have made 
 much better than Providence. But weightier 
 heads than his would have been turned by 
 th^j flattery bestowed upon him. Kings and 
 pontiffs said they could not live without him 
 and sued for his favour. The adulation of 
 Francis I for this bellicose favourite knew no 
 bounds, and the calmest days in Cellini's 
 annals are perhaps those he spent in quarrels 
 and hard work in that castle of the Petit - 
 Nesle where he evoked his Diane de Poitiers — 
 a courtier's compliment in bronze to the 
 reigning Diane. He alarmed no one and 
 amused all, and his book lives, as he did, 
 because it is human. 
 
156 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 That is why it charmed such different men 
 as Horace Walpole and Lamartine, why 
 Schiller loved it and Goethe translated it. It 
 is as extravagant in its merry Renaissance 
 brutality as Rousseau's Confessions are ex- 
 travagant in their eighteenth-century sensi- 
 bility ; and for vainglory and completeness of 
 self -exposure it can only be compared to Jean 
 Jacques' pages. Yet the two works are the 
 opposite of one another. Benvenuto does not 
 know what introspection means, and that is 
 why he carries us along: like a high wind, 
 making havoc — ^violent, but not unhealthy. 
 
 Nevertheless, he stood on the downhill 
 slope. His copious means were greater than 
 his ends. His art showed no ideal, not even 
 one of physical beauty such as glorified ^^enice ; 
 it hadno outlook and no future. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FRUITS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 After 1550 the Renaissance in Italy ceased 
 to be a movement forwards, even in Venice, 
 the last place where it lingered. Its youngest 
 artist was Correggio, whose frolicking cupids 
 at Parma on the inappropriate ceiling of a 
 convent prove him to be a decorator of the 
 first order ; whose wonderful power of chiaros- 
 curo proves him to be a great virtuoso. But 
 his effects already tend towards being over- 
 effective; his Virgins in strong lights amidst 
 strong sliadows are almost melodramatic ; his 
 soft downy bloom on flesh and draperies is 
 little short of a trick. No less was Andrea 
 del Sarto marred by the element of the 
 virtuoso; while men like Raphael's pupil, 
 Giulio Romano, painter and architect, were 
 mere reproducers, living by exaggeration and 
 making capital out of other men's genius. 
 
 Besir?o these forerunners of the end there 
 
 were other artists who lived in the Renaissance 
 
 157 
 
158 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 but were not altogether of it : people like 
 Bandello, the story-teller, the writer of 
 Novelle, who happened to reach his zenith in 
 the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but 
 who might have flourished at any period. His 
 craft was but an embodiment of a popular 
 demand that has always existed, whether in 
 the days of the heroes, or in those of chivalry. 
 It is true that the Decameron — a work so much 
 greater and more beautiful than its successors — 
 gave a model to these narrators, and that the 
 Renaissance lent their instinct the form of art, 
 but the spirit of Bandello's craft, its racy 
 shrewdness and broad disillusioned wit belong 
 to the Italy of all times, the Italy which pro- 
 duced that paradoxical fruit of the Latin 
 races — cynical Romance. 
 
 In poetry also there was romance without 
 idealism; in literature, as in painting, there 
 was beauty without glory. Ludovico Ariosto 
 (1474-1533) was, in some measure, the Correggio 
 of letters ; he had the pen of a great decorator. 
 Essentially the lam*eate of courts, he was no 
 less the complete self-conscious artist in the 
 modem sense of the word, hyper-sensitive, 
 aesthetic, sophisticated. It is on the surface of 
 
FRUITS OF THE RENAISSANCE 159 
 
 the movement, through his luscious imagery, 
 his embroideries in words, his chiselled use of 
 style, that Ariosto makes part of the Renais- 
 sance. In his Orlando Furioso, his re-creation 
 of the old tale of chivalry, of knights and maids 
 Christian and Paynim, of Charlemagne and 
 Orlando and Angelica, Ruggiero and Brada- 
 mante, he invented what has been called the 
 Romantic Epic, or, rather, he continued with 
 genius the narrative that the cruder Boiardo 
 had begun. Romantic it is, on the outside, in 
 a fashion not so remote from that of Bandello. 
 Ariosto's men and women no more move our 
 feelings than the figures in rich old tapestries, 
 which were not evoked, we know, spon- 
 taneously, but were elaborately stitched in 
 colours that charm the eye. Ariosto, like 
 Spenser, used the stage trappings of Romance, 
 its magic and its monsters, but he did not lift 
 them to the plane of imagination by any fan- 
 tastic thought or Platonic allegory such as in- 
 spired the Faerie Queene. In some ways — in his 
 strange' mixture of satire and grandiloquence, 
 in his simple perception of sensuous beauty — 
 Ariosto, allowing for difference of century, is 
 more comparable to Byron than to Spenser. 
 
160 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 His poem, however, had purposes equally 
 foreign to both. It is a tissue of flattery of 
 the Este family, whose forbears he celebrates 
 in the guise of these legendary characters. 
 
 No man had a greater contemporary reputa- 
 tion. His plays, so much admired by Leo X, 
 contributed to it, and when Alfonso d'Este, 
 Lucrezia Borgia's husband, set up his theatre 
 in 1532, Ariosto superintended its management. 
 His success is the more interesting, because life 
 had early brought him hardship, and, sedentary 
 man of letters as he was, he had been forced 
 into struggle with realities. At twenty-six 
 he was left without means, the protector of 
 nine brothers and sisters. He entered the 
 employ of Ippolito d'Este, and apparently 
 remained honest, refusing a lucrative career 
 in the Church because he felt no vocation for 
 it. He fulfilled several political missions, but 
 the best of his energies were given to Orlando 
 Furioso, which, with his thirst for perfection, 
 he took ten years to write and sixteen more 
 to polish. It was finished in 1515, while he 
 was still with Ippolito. In 1518, he changed 
 masters and sought the service of Alfonso 
 d'Este, at whose court in Ferrara he lived, a 
 
FRUITS OF THE RENAISSANCE 161 
 
 cherished Apollo, revising his poems, educating 
 his son, prospering till his death. 
 
 Ariosto was the last literary representative 
 of the Renaissance. His successor, Bernardo 
 Tasso (1544-1594), died, it is true, before 1600, 
 but his RinaldOf written at eighteen, and his 
 Gerusalemme Liberata, at thirty, with their 
 noble sentiments and religious tendency, had 
 already travelled far from the movement, and 
 he no more belonged to it than would Schiller 
 have done, had he lived then. • ' • 
 
 There are others who are rather the de- 
 scendants than the children of the Renais- 
 sance — first among them, Giordano Bruno 
 (1548-1600), the heretical Dominican, who 
 repudiated the doctrines of the Incarnation 
 and the Trinity; who condemned the use 
 Christ made of miracles, and dimly fore- 
 shadowed the tenets of evolution; who pro- 
 noimced this world to be only one out of an 
 infinite number and first conceived of it as 
 set in boundless ether ; who said the Universe 
 was a Being, and reconciled science with God, 
 matter with spirit. At once ribald and 
 reverent, he might with some reason be called 
 the son of the Reformation, although he did 
 
162 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 not care about Luther and, while he beheved 
 in no Church, preferred that of CathoHcism 
 to the rest. He himself endures more vividly 
 than the books which embody him — ^his De 
 Umbris Idearum, De Nomade, De Triplice, 
 Delia Causa, Del Infinito Universo. But it 
 is his visit to England and to Oxford, his 
 record of his supper with Fulke Greville in 
 his Cena Ceneri, and its dedication to Sidney, 
 which give him a place in the picture. His 
 death at the stake in 1600 symbolizes the 
 birth of the future, not the death of the 
 past. 
 
 For, as far as Italy was concerned, the past 
 was dead, or dying. In art, in literature, in 
 life, there was an absence of what is big, and 
 in its place there was excess. Outline was 
 smothered in detail, there was over -expres- 
 sion, sensationalism; there were sprawling 
 figures and violent attitudes. Yet nothing 
 that has lived can live in vain. From the 
 chaotic decay of the great creative period 
 came forth, at first unrecognized, the new-born 
 spirit of the modern world — the spirit of 
 criticism and of science. And, in a lesser 
 fashion, the torch of knowledge was passed 
 
FRUITS OF THE RENAISSANCE 163 
 
 on at once to other countries. Though the Hfe 
 of the Renaissance in Italy was over, she 
 helped it to prosper elsewhere. For Germany, 
 like herself, its day was done, but England and 
 France took up the tale. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EENAISSANCE OF THE NORTHERN 
 RACES 
 
 Out of the Italian Renaissance there issued 
 a new-born art; out of the Northern Renais- 
 sance there came forth a new-born rehgion. 
 There came forth also a great school of poetry, 
 and a drama the greatest that the world 
 had seen since the days of Greece. The 
 religion was the offspring of Germany, the 
 drama and the poetry that of England. 
 
 There was thus, one might almost say, a gulf 
 fixed between the Renaissance of the Northern 
 peoples and that of the Latins in Italy whence 
 the North drew its sustenance; and in the 
 end Germany arose and with the sword of 
 the Reformation slew the Mother-Renais- 
 sance. This is significant. Wherever the 
 Renaissance broke with religion it ceased to 
 live on as a direct movement. And in Italy, 
 France and Spain, where modern Paganism, the 
 
 Inquisition, the wars of Religion alike helped 
 
 164 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 165 
 
 to corrupt and to arrest it, the Renaissance 
 itself was exterminated even while it continued 
 to work. But in the Teuton countries, in 
 England and Germany, which in those days 
 comprised the Netherlands and much of 
 Switzerland, the Renaissance was carried 
 straight forward, through the channels of 
 religion on the one hand and of a great 
 romantic drama on the other. Luther, no 
 less than Shakespeare, was the child of the 
 new ideas, of the cult of Nature and of Unity. 
 And even when the later followers of the 
 Reformation, the English Puritans, arose and 
 made war against beauty, their cause was 
 merged in political issues, and English freedom 
 was too strong for it. The ultimate expression 
 of puritanism was Milton, who was equally the 
 child of the Renaissance. 
 
 The Revival of Learning in Germany is 
 sufficiently distinguished from that of Italy 
 when we realize that among its principal 
 sources was Thomas k Kempis (1380-1471). 
 There gathered round that great mystic a 
 group of devout f^cholars, apostles alike 
 of knowledge and of Christianity, and one 
 of them, Rudolph Agricola, earliest of 
 Teutonic Humanists, was the first man of 
 
166 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 erudition to recognize the schoolboy Erasmus. 
 Erasmus, the sovereign of the Northern 
 Renaissance, was thus, as it were, the grand- 
 child of Thomas a Kempis. Nor did these 
 pioneers spring out of nothing. The German 
 gift for the science of education is of long 
 date, and, in the fourteenth century, the 
 Schools of the Christian Brethren founded a 
 tradition of wide culture as well as of piety. 
 The contemporary Petrarch was not without 
 effect upon this search after learning, but he 
 did not initiate it. And ^neas Sylvius, when 
 he came to Germany, brought with him the 
 influence jof Italy with lasting results; but 
 he, also, only gave new life and new colour 
 to what was there, witnessing further that 
 the German Renaissance did not derive from 
 Italy. . ' 
 
 In one sense, indeed, it may be said that 
 there was no Renaissance in Germany. The 
 movement there was almost entirely intel- 
 lectual. It showed no pagan joy and pride; 
 it could boast no Patrons excepting a handful 
 of potentates and burghers : the poetizing 
 Emperor Maximilian, the Elector Frederick 
 of Saxony, Albert, Archbishop of Mainz, the 
 wealthy Fuggers, the literary Pirkheimer ; and 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 167 
 
 its sense of beauty — the simple outward sense 
 — was secondary, often non-existent. The 
 beauty of German art is chiefly abstract — a 
 ':)eauty of idea. The Virgins of Van Eyck 
 and Albrecht Diirer are distinguished more by 
 majesty than by beauty; a kind of meta- 
 physical fancy rather than any sensuous per- 
 ception stamps the rest of Diirer's work and 
 that of his contemporaries. And outside 
 painting, the range of the arts was limited. 
 Architecture represented little more than a 
 prolongation of the Gothic style; while Teu- 
 tonic sculpture could show few names com- 
 pared to the numbers in Italy. Thus also 
 with individuals. Even Erasmus, more finely 
 strung than the otHer Northern Humanists, 
 seems to lack aesthetic faculties. The art of 
 Rome, of Raphael and Michael Angelo, left him 
 apparently unaffected. He could not bear 
 Church music. " In college or monastery it 
 is still the same : music, nothing but music," 
 he wrote — " there was no music in St. Paul's 
 time. Money must be raised to buy organs, 
 when poor starving creatures might be fed 
 at the cost of them." And again : " My fear 
 is that with the revival of Greek literature, 
 there may be a revival of Paganism." He 
 
168 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and his compatriots were, in fact, not only 
 devoid of the pagan spirit, they were pre- 
 occupied with something else. 
 
 This preoccupation was Christianity; not 
 the half-philosophical, half-fantastic Christi- 
 anity of a Ficino, but a plain, evangelical piety 
 which aimed at the restoration of primitive 
 apostolic sincerity. When Erasmus and Colet, 
 Dean of St. Paul's, took their walks together 
 in London, their main subject of conversation 
 " was Christ," as Erasmus . relates — a very 
 different theme from the topics chosen by the 
 Bembos and Bibbienas. And when, in 1516, 
 Erasmus published his Latin translation of 
 the Greek Testament, the first version from 
 the Greek, the public was more prepared than 
 has been supposed, for there had appeared 
 at close intervals, from 1470 onwards, no less 
 than fourteen translations of the Bible into 
 High and Low German. Erasmus' rendering 
 of the Gospels was an epoch for the world; 
 it was a literary piece of work, attractive to 
 readers of refinement, while his comments, 
 pointing with subtle irony to the contrast 
 between the precepts of Christ and the practice 
 of the Church, were strokes of genius com- 
 pelling men to listen. He was the voice, but 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 169 
 
 he was not the pioneer. Others less gifted 
 had tried to meet the need they saw; he 
 alone gave enduring form to his endeavour. 
 
 The attempt to revive primitive Christianity 
 made one corner-stone of German Humanism, 
 and the hatred of the monks made the other^ 
 Here again the pen of Erasmus, the salt of 
 his wit, did what nothing else had done, and 
 his barbed laugh pierced more effectually than 
 any soldier's sword. He and the less delicate 
 Ulrich von Hutten effectually forged that 
 great weapon of the German movement, 
 serious satire, the art which was their great 
 contribution to the Renaissance. It was 
 mainly directed against the prelates and the 
 friars. Erasmus, the enfranchized Dominican, 
 was well versed in his subject. 
 
 The art of satire involves taste; and taste, 
 the element imported into learning by Erasmus 
 and his colleagues, was the link between Italy 
 and Germany. But taste brought its weak- 
 nesses with it. It took up too much room, 
 and it came to substitute conviction of folly 
 for conviction of sin. Conviction of folly 
 engenders criticism, not action. Erasmus, 
 Von Hutten, Colet, prepared men's minds for 
 the Reformation, they could not make it. It 
 
170 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 is conviction of sin which produces deed, and 
 when that conviction took shape it meant 
 Luther on the one hand, and the martyrdom 
 of Thomas More upon the other. Luther 
 produced results beyond his ken. The con- 
 viction of sin was the death-blow to the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 Such, roughly speaking, were the features 
 of the German Revival. Religious thought 
 and the power of analysis were the final fruits 
 it added to the European harvest. England, 
 for her part, as we have seen, brought with 
 her a sheaf of redder gold — her drama and 
 her poetry. In England, for good or for ill, 
 the strongest element is the moral one; and 
 drama and poetry, more than other forms of 
 art, seem to make a debatable land where 
 force and beauty, morals and emotions meet, 
 whether for tragic conflict, or for the contrasts 
 of comedy, or to be fused into one in the 
 flame of lyric intensity. France, in her turn, 
 put forth her own qualities — her genius for 
 criticism of art and life; her graceful inven- 
 tion never too great to be useful, which built 
 chateaux and planned gardens; her exquisite 
 sense of form which produced the finished 
 poetry of the Pleiade; her practical philo- 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 171 
 
 sophy, gay and sceptical, which found ex- 
 pression in Rabelais and Montaigne. 
 
 Space fails us to dwell longer upon the 
 individual gifts contributed by the Northern 
 countries to the world of new ideas. The 
 Humanists, we must repeat, were in themselves 
 a nation, abolishing nationality, with Latin 
 as their common tongue and intellectual free- 
 trade as their privilege. In this way Erasmus, 
 More, Colet, Reuchlin, fall naturally into the 
 same group, and so do the Northern artists 
 who interpreted the thought of the day ; while 
 the thinkers, Rabelais, Montaigne, and their 
 foster-child. Bacon, make another interrelated 
 circle, bound by some threads to Erasmus and 
 his school and by others to the fatherlands 
 which bore them. The poetry of England 
 and. of France must be kept for a separate 
 chapter. 
 
 The interpretation of ideas in the North, 
 as in the South, began with art. In sculpture, 
 if not in other ways, the forerunners of the 
 German Renaissance were as striking as their 
 Italian counterparts. The carved Virgins and 
 Sybils and Saints, the portrait-statues and 
 allegorical figures of Bamberg and Strassburg, 
 Freiberg and Halberstadt, between 1225 and 
 
172 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 1270, amaze us by their naturalism and their 
 mastery, and by a beauty which far surpasses 
 that realized by later workmen. For the most 
 part their creators have left no name; no 
 German Pisano founded a school among them ; 
 and in spite of certain general resemblances, 
 each town developed its own qualities. The 
 first art to bring the North into wide reputation 
 was the painting of Flanders. Enriched by 
 the rule of Burgundian Dukes and encouraged 
 by their patronage, that country was a natural 
 school for artists. It rapidly produced men 
 of a technique so extraordinary and of such a 
 deep knowledge of processes that they inspired 
 envy even in Italy — apart from the discovery 
 of oils generally ascribed to them. 
 
 Here Jan Van Eyck (after 1380-1440), aided 
 by his elder brother, Hubert, gave the world 
 a new revelation in his mighty picture, " The 
 Adoration of the Lamb." Both were in- 
 augurators, and they were followed by Roger 
 Van der Weyden, who was at his prime in 
 the first half of the fifteenth century {d, 1464) ; 
 by Hans Memling (1430-1495), who worked in 
 the second ; by his contemporaries, Hugo Van 
 der Goes and Antonello da Messina ; and later, 
 by Dierck Bouts and Gerard David (1484- 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 173 
 
 1523), by Mabuse, Lucas van der Leyden, and 
 Van Orley ; greater than these last, by Quentin 
 Matsys (1460-1531). At the same time as 
 the ear Her among these painters, from 1425 
 onwards, there flourished in the region of the 
 Upper Rhine the School of Cologne, with its 
 Masters of the Great and Lesser Passion, of the 
 Life and Family of the Virgin, artists more 
 homely than the Flemings. All were alike 
 distinguished by the Gospel piety, the simple- 
 hearted, literal realism which contrasts so 
 strongly with the mystical fancy, the symbolic 
 grace, the imaginative ritual of Italy. The 
 human and practical side of religion w^as what 
 these men cared for. In spite of the orthodox 
 Catholic dogma that their canvases expressed, 
 they seem to have borne in them the uncon- 
 scious seeds of Protestantism. A glorious 
 fidelity is their note, and this devotion to 
 reality could never degenerate into material- 
 ism; it was raised by reverence and dignified 
 by humility. To them nothing was too small 
 or too large for infinite labour, whether it were 
 a marvellously painted tear upon the cheek 
 of an ugly, sorrow-stricken Magdalen, or a 
 minute wrinkle in an opulent old burgher's 
 face, or the sky and greensward in Van Eyck's 
 
174 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 " Adoration of the Lamb." But the tear is 
 more characteristic than the greensward. In 
 spite of the glow and radiance of that great 
 picture, or of the jewelled innocence and 
 happiness of Memling's musician-angels, or of 
 the serenity of David's saints, sadness rather 
 than gladness is the characteristic of Flemish 
 artists. The struggle, and grief of the North 
 are in them, together with its conscience; 
 their very Queens of Heaven are sombre, and 
 no brushes are more vivid than theirs in the 
 rendering of woe. Their contribution to art 
 is not poetry, it is a noble prose — a prose 
 which was suited both to the Humanists and 
 the Reformers. 
 
 It made no unfitting background for Eras- 
 mus, their spiritual descendant and their 
 colleague. They and the earliest Human- 
 ists — Johann Miiller (or Reggiomontanus), 
 Bessarion's pupil in Greek and a great 
 astronomer ; Peuerbach, his master in science ; 
 Agricola, the scholar in Hebrew, Latin, 
 medicine; Wympherling, the Vittorino of 
 Germany, had already died, or were near 
 ending, when Erasmus grew up. Desiderius 
 Erasmus (1467-1536) is so well known to us 
 as Holbein's furred and gowned scholar with 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 175 
 
 the half-smile of playful irony, that it is hard 
 to think of him as the mutinous, helpless 
 orphan, forced and wheedled by a wicked 
 guardian into a monastery, tied by vows 
 before he knew where he was, without voca- 
 tion and without means of escape. 
 
 Under the circumstances he did the best 
 he could for himself in accepting the only exit 
 possible, the rather undignified post of secre- 
 tary to the Bishop of Cambrai. This meant 
 travel and a permanent patron, and presently 
 the Bishop fulfilled the young man's wish 
 and sent him to the University of Paris. By 
 unremitting toil, which' cost him his health, 
 he had already made himself a man of learning. 
 But he had been trammelled — Greek was still 
 suspected in Holland as savouring of heresy. 
 In Paris he was free to pursue knowledge. 
 Yet here again Erasmus is hardly like his 
 portrait. The young Dominican monk lived 
 a life of letters, of light loves and pleasure, 
 in the Bohemia of the moment. He did not 
 come into his own, intellectually speaking, 
 until, when close on thirty, he went to England 
 at Lord Mountjoy's invitation, and proved 
 himself — what he was by nature — a. literary 
 man of the world. In England as in Paris 
 
176 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 his personal charm bewitched men and made 
 friends for him wherever he went. His, ab- 
 sence produced a blank. " His return," wrote 
 a comrade, was " recovering what was part of 
 Our souls, however torn he was and battered." 
 His faults and his grumblings about unkind 
 patrons and stingy comrades, in face of the 
 large sums showered on him, count for 
 nothing; they were but the clouds of sick 
 and fastidious nerves needing luxury and 
 freedom from care. The real Erasmus was 
 he who became the intimate of Sir Thomas 
 More and Dean Colet. 
 
 England had made a stride in the acquisition 
 of culture. It was but some fifty years since 
 the scholar, Poggio, came to visit Cardinal 
 Beaufort 'and was shocked at the barbarism 
 he found — ^the gluttonous meals, four hours 
 long, the neglect of learning. But when 
 Erasmus arrived the young King, Henry VIII, 
 had begun his reign with an announcement 
 that he thought learning the thing best worth 
 living for. The teaching of Greek was begin- 
 ning, although most Greek students still went 
 abroad to master it and Cambridge lacked 
 Greek scholarship until Erasmus came to 
 lecture there. The study of Latin and of 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 177 
 
 Letters had made quicker progress. Colet 
 was far famed as a Latinist and a lecturer, 
 and hardly less known were the lectures of 
 Grocyn and Linacre, the King's physician, 
 both of whom had sat under Poliziano at 
 Florence, and brought Italian memories to 
 England. These, together with Thomas More, 
 man of letters and of affairs, made as choice 
 a company as the Renaissance could produce. 
 If that movement came slowly in England, it 
 came seriously, purged of its grosser elements, 
 and these its votaries were spiritual men even 
 in their brilliance, disliking licence as much 
 as they disliked narrowness. Brilliant they 
 were, and the Symposium at Oxford at which 
 Colet and Erasmus discussed the characters 
 of Cain and Abel, and Erasmus improvised 
 his vivid legend of Cain's corruption of the 
 sentry at the gate of Eden, was a different 
 kind of feast from that described by Poggio. 
 
 Erasmus had the genius for friendship. His 
 name became inseparable from the names of 
 More and Colet. " To admire is to imitate," 
 he said, and, with regard to each other, all 
 three men practised this precept. 
 
 If Erasmus, as accomplished in the himting- 
 field as in the study, was the most dazzling of 
 
 M 
 
178 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 the trio, More was, in body, mind and spirit, 
 the most attractive ; as merry as he was holy, 
 witty without unkindness, kind without in- 
 sipidity, fascinating without vanity, the St. 
 Francis of the Renaissance to whom flocked 
 all living creatures, not forgetting the birds 
 of " Chelsey " who fed daily from his hand. 
 *' He is wise with the wise and jests with 
 fools," writes Erasmus ..." his talk is full 
 of fun but never scurrilous ... he can make 
 fun of anything." More's eyes, he tells us, 
 were " grey with black spots," of the kind 
 then supposed in England to mean genius, 
 his hair " shot black and yellow," his face 
 pale, his strong hands the " only sign of 
 rusticity." In his youth he had meant to be 
 a priest, had prepared for the Church with 
 fast and vigil ; but he fell deeply in love and, 
 seeing where lay true purity, he gave up orders 
 for marriage. And he made the most faithful 
 of husbands, although, faithful also to the 
 Renaissance, he wrote a treatise in defence 
 of Plato's theory of community of wives. 
 Home life suited him. He loved children, he 
 loved music, he hated courts and quarrels, and 
 did his best to escape the attentions of the 
 King. But he did not succeed. Favour was 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 179 
 
 poured upon him until he finally reached the 
 Chancellorship. 
 
 Colet was soberer, less many-sided — by set 
 intention as well as by nature. Tall and 
 handsome, a cultivated traveller in France 
 and Italy, he was not born pious. " He was," 
 says Erasmus, " naturally hot and resentful, 
 indolent, fond of pleasure and of women's 
 society, disposed to make a joke of everything. 
 He told me that he had fought against his 
 faults with fast and prayer. . . . Not but 
 what you could see traces of the old Adam, 
 when wit was flying at feast or festival. He 
 avoided large parties for this reason." But 
 he made an art of friendship; conversation 
 was meat and drink to him. And he was racy, 
 even in his religion. The Schoolmen he hated, 
 and chief among them, Aquinas, who " would 
 not (he said) have laid down the law as boldly 
 on all things in heaven and earth if he had not 
 been an arrogant fool." He had a particular 
 dislike of Bishops and he thought that priestly 
 avarice and arrogance were " worse than a 
 hundred concubines," envy and ignorance 
 than unchastity. Many accepted doctrines 
 he owned that he did not believe, " but he 
 would not create scandal," says Erasmus, 
 
180 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 " by blurting out his objections." His faith 
 took more practical forms than controversy. 
 All his best powers were given to the young — 
 to the great School of St. Paul's that he 
 founded. His entire fortune went to it. He 
 made it a centre of enlightenment and he 
 set it on a business basis, characteristically 
 appointing married laymen as trustees because 
 they had more conscience than clerics. 
 
 Both he and Erasmus looked upon teaching 
 as the highest of callings. To a Cambridge 
 pedagogue who disparaged his profession, 
 Erasmus replied that Christ had not despised 
 children; that no one could do better than 
 bring the little ones to Him. All three men 
 were united by a common, an absorbing aim 
 — ^the revival of Christ's Christianity in the 
 Church. " Nothing," wrote Erasmus, " is 
 worse than relaxed religion," words that rang 
 in the Reformation. The moment seemed 
 propitious, for King Henry, at the outset of 
 life, appeared to be the leader of these adven- 
 turers and inspired by the same purpose. " It 
 is," he said, " my earnest wish to restore 
 Christ's religion to its primitive purity . . c 
 you and we together with our joint counsel 
 and resources will build again the Gospel of 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 181 
 
 Christ." Men were concerned with the sub- 
 ject. More's lectures on Augustine's De 
 Civitate Dei, and those of Colet upon St. Paul's 
 Epistles drew crowds. Curiosity about the 
 Scriptures was in the air, and the great wish 
 of Erasmus was to see them in the hands of 
 every man. " I long," he said, *' that the 
 husbandman should sing them to himself as 
 he follows the plough, that the weaver should 
 hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that 
 the traveller should beguile with them the 
 weariness of his journey." 
 
 He was perhaps the first man to take a 
 literary pleasure in the Bible, and his taste, 
 like his conviction, foimd the right channel 
 for expression. In 1516, he published his 
 Latin translation of the New Testament to- 
 gether with his comments — the book which 
 illumined a public hitherto accustomed to 
 chanted Gospels. Before Erasmus achieved 
 this big critical task, he had undergone many 
 vicissitudes, travelling from France to Rome 
 and Holland, and back to England, to which 
 he paid four or five more visits. He had also 
 printed his Adagia — a collection of quotations 
 from the Ancients, with his comments — ^and 
 his Colloquia, discourses on current questions, 
 
182 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 both of which achieved immense popularity. 
 They were followed by his translation of 
 Si, Jerome's Letters, which, as a picture of 
 Early Christian life, he intended as a supple- 
 ment to his Testament ; and by his scintillat- 
 ing satire on the Church and on officialdom. 
 Encomium Morice (The Praise of Folly), the 
 fruit of his talks at Chelsea with Thomas 
 More, to whom the book, with its punning 
 title, was dedicated. *' Will religion vanish if 
 I ridicule superstition ? " asked Erasmus, and 
 his blade of scorn flew out against ignorance 
 and credulity. 
 
 He made the Reformation inevitable, yet 
 his gift was for opening windows, not for 
 building, and when Luther refused to repair 
 a crumbling edifice and began to construct a 
 new one, Erasmus resisted. The monks said 
 that he had laid the egg and Luther had 
 hatched it. " Yes," said Erasmus, " but the 
 egg I laid was a hen, and Luther hatched a 
 gamecock." Much of his remaining time was 
 spent in trying to counteract the gamecock, 
 but those were not his most productive 
 moments. He was best when he was at his 
 ease, and it was in England that his spirit 
 felt at home. The King and the Primate, 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 183 
 
 Warham, Erasmus' princely friend, offered 
 him every inducement of place and money 
 to continue with them, but his restless soul 
 liked to be moving and saw happiness wher- 
 ever he was not. His body too quickly wore 
 out and he died in 1536, before he was sixty. 
 A year before. More had gone to the scaffold, 
 impelled to a heroism of which Erasmus' 
 critical mind would have been incapable. 
 
 Meanwhile, other blades had flashed forth 
 in (Germany in the same cause as his, chief 
 among them those of Reuchlin, the Humanist, 
 and of Ulrich von Hutten. Reuchlin (1455- 
 1522), who had studied Greek in Paris and 
 had heard Agyropulos in Rome, determined 
 to devote his powers to the Hebrew language, 
 as a key to a scholarly understanding of the 
 Old Testament; also of the Cabala — then 
 reverenced as the authentic oracle of Jewish 
 tradition, and only long after proved to be a 
 mere invention of the thirteenth century. He 
 became the lover, the defender of Hebrew, 
 compiled a Grammar and a lexicon, and wrote 
 pamphlets. But these were not his real 
 contribution to enlightenment. In 1509, 
 Pfefferkorn, a converted Jew and a parvenu in 
 Church doctrine, tried to persuade Maximilian 
 
184 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 to suppress all Hebrew books except the Bible. 
 The Emperor consulted Reuchlin, who vehe- 
 mently opposed the measure. Pfefferkorn 
 vindictively denounced him as a foe of ortho- 
 doxy, so did the Dominicans of Cologne. He 
 was persecuted, tried, acquitted, and afterwards 
 condemned, but without results. Maximilian 
 and Leo were both, at heart, of his opinion. 
 But the issue at stake was larger than Reuch- 
 lin 's personal fate. The German Humanists 
 threw down the gauntlet for the Jews and for 
 religious toleration. Battle raged and the 
 victory seemed doubtful, till, in 1514, there 
 appeared the first volume of the mordant 
 Epistolce obscurorum Virorum, by an author 
 little known; followed two years later by a 
 second — the part that has endured — ^from the 
 pen of Ulrich von Hutten. It was a cutting 
 satire on pedants and bigots, a master-stroke 
 dealt on the side of Reuchlin; the world 
 laughed, and the field was won. Ulrich's wit 
 was too crude for the palate of Erasmus, but 
 the broader and warmer More delighted in it. 
 Reuchlin's triumph gave a fresh impulse to the 
 growing zeal for Biblical criticism and to the 
 search after knowledge. 
 
 One of those most keen in this search was 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 185 
 
 Philip Melancthon (1497-1560), hailed by 
 Erasmus as the rising light of classical learn- 
 ing and, at his prompting, appointed to the 
 Greek Chair at Wittenberg. Here he char- 
 acteristically lectured both on the Epistle to 
 Titus and on Homer, seeking, as he said, from 
 that poet " Tyrian brass and gems to adorn 
 God's temple " — inciting his beloved Martin 
 Luther, his elder by fourteen years, to the 
 study of Greek. And here he himself turned 
 more and more towards the doctrines of the 
 Reformation and made friendships with men 
 of a like mind. Among them was Albrecht 
 Diirer of NUrnberg. 
 
 Never did a movement find such an inter- 
 preter as the Reformation found in Diirer 
 (1471-1525). " Oh, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 
 where wilt thou tarry? Hear, Christian 
 Knight, ride forth with the Lord Jesus, 
 defend the right, obtain the martyr's crown ! " 
 Thus wrote Diirer, and, as we read, his Knight 
 on the white horse, engraven as he only could 
 engrave, rises before our eyes. " Thou art an 
 old mannikin," he goes on — reminding Eras- 
 mus that his hour-glass was running out — 
 " dedicate these years to the cause of the 
 Gospel." To Martin Luther, "the Spirit- 
 
186 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 enlightened one, the follower of the true 
 Christian faith," he gave a feeling very near 
 worship. He sent him drawings, he " longed 
 for a greeting," and when Luther was treacher- 
 ously imprisoned Diirer was broken-hearted. 
 But he only regarded Luther's tenets as a 
 purified form of the old religion, a return to 
 Christ, and the entries in his journal of pay- 
 ments to his Confessor prove that formally he 
 remained a Catholic. He was more prone to 
 see points of union than points of difference, 
 like Michael Angelo, whom in other ways he 
 resembles : in his simple piety, his philo- 
 sophical intellect, his profound humility, if 
 not in the stormy power of suffering. Family 
 love — he was one of eighteen children — was as 
 strong in him as his faith. To his father, the 
 God-fearing old goldsmith, he gave devotion; 
 his mother he took to live with him and tended 
 her to the end. All the best German qualities 
 accompanied his genius; the citizens of 
 Niirnberg adored him : " Albrecht, my soul's 
 better part," Wilibald Pirkheimer, patron, 
 writer, reformer, once called him. 
 
 His gifts showed themselves in childhood 
 and he was early apprenticed to the painter, 
 Michael Wohlgemuth of Niirnberg, who, to- 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 187 
 
 gather with Martin Schongauer, was then the 
 best-known master of painting. From that 
 time onwards, his outward hfe as an artist is 
 a record of marvellous progress and incredible 
 industry, of travel, of two or three journeys 
 in mid-life to Venice and another in 1520 to 
 the Netherlands — a record, too, wherever he 
 went, of triumphant success. Raphael wrote 
 him pages of adulation; Bellini became his 
 intimate friend; in Brussels he learned to 
 know Matsys and Van der Leyden, he visited 
 Erasmus. As an engraver of wood and 
 copper he was incomparable; his scheme of 
 fortification is still used in Germany; and his 
 vast project of an Encyclopaedia of art for 
 the young, for which he wrote 150 treatises, 
 most of which have perished, would alone 
 have been the work of a lifetime. 
 
 But it is his pencil which makes him im- 
 mortal. Its output seemed endless, and all 
 that he drew, painted or engraved is stamped 
 with the same impress, that of deep-hearted 
 thought, grave, almost sad, rejoicing more in 
 the works of God than in those of man, yet 
 full of love and pity: thought sometimes 
 driven by the study of lavish Nature into 
 elaborate fancy. His " Melancholia," seated 
 
188 THE RENAISSANCE || 
 
 impotent in her might, rugged, beyond beauty 
 yet possessing it, is the completest epitome of 
 Diirer's powers, with her useless wings and 
 her useless crown of laurel, the tired Love 
 drooping at her side, and all around her every 
 tool of art and science, every symbol of man's 
 faculties, except those of a faith which alone 
 could quicken the will to use them — a draughts- 
 man's pendant in brief to a Shakespeare's 
 Hamlet. A like fervent intellect penetrates 
 the remaining " Complexions," the Sanguine 
 and the Contemplative; or the same subject 
 treated in the guise of the Apostles; or his 
 Virgins; or the "Great" and the "Little 
 Passion," and the " Green Passion " ; or the 
 " Prodigal Son " ; or the studies of wings and 
 plants and beasts. 
 
 " Their wealth of fancy," he writes of 
 painters, " was common to them and to God." 
 And again : " Never imagine that you can 
 do, or desire to do, something better than 
 what God has given His created being the 
 power to do, for his capacity is powerless 
 against the creative power of God." Man 
 need never ascribe results to himself, for 
 first he imitates Nature, the one and only 
 mistress, and " then it is no more called his 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 189 
 
 own, but has become art." Diirer's humility 
 is not of the Renaissance. " The many see 
 more than one, possible as it may be that, 
 for once, one man sees more than a thousand," 
 — so he says, unconscious that his words sweep 
 away tlie whole of second-rate art. But when 
 that " one man " is found, " the collected and 
 secret treasure of the heart becomes manifest 
 through the work, and the new creature which 
 is created in the heart is the form of a thing." 
 To that form Diirer was always loyal, even 
 at the expense of outward attractions. His 
 was the cult of the idea. " That cannot be 
 painted," said Pirkheimer, speaking of the 
 Last Supper. " It should not be thought" 
 replied Diirer, and the awe which inspired his 
 answer is perhaps the best measure of his 
 greatness. . 
 
 German art is, as it were, the child born of 
 philosophy and of fairy-tale. Both elements 
 mark the groups of fantastic, literal painters, 
 each of them native to its own city, for every 
 free town boasted its individual school of 
 artists, as of scholars. Chief among these 
 towns ranked Niirnberg and Augsburg, and 
 first among Augsburg Masters, in Diirer's day, 
 ranked Altdorfer (between 1480 and 1488-1538) 
 
190 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 — Albrecht Altdorf er, painter of magic forests, 
 of strange Knights and of Fauns, of Death and 
 the lovers, also of that " Battle of Arbela," 
 now in Munich, which was once the treasure of 
 Napoleon's bathroom. Like Diirer, Altdorfer 
 was a Reformer, and almost the only detail 
 we know concerning him is that he refused to 
 pay for Masses for his soul, but left instead a 
 precious goblet, his wedding-gift to his wife, 
 to be sold for the poor. And there is Cranach, 
 another Lutheran (1472-1553), yet the least 
 sober, the most fleshly of the Germans, with 
 his coquettish Eves, and his " Land of 
 Cocagne," and his ornate golden " Fountain 
 of Youth," to which rows of lords and ladies, 
 slashed and doubleted, are repairing to win 
 back their prime. Even in Hans Holbein 
 (1497-1543), most famous for his rich, reflec- 
 tive portraits, we find a kindred power over 
 fact and fiction in his *' Dance of Death " at 
 Basel. 
 
 German sculpture takes no different direc- 
 tion. The same note is always struck : 
 whether it is in the Knights of legend, and 
 the Saints like long-haired princesses from 
 the hand of the Suabian Riemenschneider 
 (1461-1531); or in the works in stone and 
 
THE NORTHERN RACES 191 
 
 wood of the earlier school of Niirnberg, in 
 their fountains, shrines and stations — in the 
 statues of Peter Vischer and Veit Stoss ; above 
 all, in the homely, passionate piety of Adam 
 Kraft (1443-1507), the sculptor of the history 
 of the Cross and the Entombment. 
 
 Their art was the art of burgherdom, of a 
 refined democracy. It merged — it ended — in 
 the Reformation. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE THINKERS OF THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE 
 
 Erasmus was the finest critic produced by 
 the Renaissance ; Rabelais was its richest and 
 warmest thinker, and his thought was the 
 great contribution that France made to the 
 movement. He was one of a trio of towering 
 geniuses; Montaigne and Bacon Hved in the 
 same century as he did. But they followed 
 him — he was their pioneer. And each of these 
 men filled a separate niche. Montaigne was 
 the sceptic, the critic, who applied to life 
 and the universe the same disinterested acute 
 discernment, knowing neither fear nor limits, 
 which Erasmus only applied to institutions and 
 ideas, pulling down more nobly than he con- 
 structed. Bacon stood for universal intellect, 
 the searching light which illumined dark 
 corners for practical ends. The first English 
 master of scientific method, he saw that he 
 who would learn must start from fact and build 
 
 upwards instead of, like the Schoolmen, de- 
 
 192 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 193 
 
 ducing knowledge from preconceived theory. 
 With his Inductive Method he inaugurated a 
 new era in the study of phenomena and in 
 metaphysics ; Goethe, Darwin, Bentham were 
 alike his children. But Bacon was light, not 
 fire; he did not affect conduct or set foot 
 on the common high-road. That function was 
 fulfilled by another, by Frangois Rabelais. If 
 Bacon was the most inventive philosopher of 
 the age, Rabelais was the most imaginative. 
 It was not that he believed this or that, made 
 such or such an innovation; he suggested, 
 he stimulated in all directions; he was a 
 fountain-head irrigating distant regions and 
 remote generations. From prince to beggar 
 he loved his kind, instead of scorning the herd 
 like Erasmus and Bacon, or prying into their 
 concerns for intellectual profit like Montaigne. 
 If analogies are not too misleading, it might 
 be said that Rabelais did for thought what 
 Dickens did for fiction — ^he put it on a broader, 
 kinder basis which made his gross exaggera- 
 tions worth while. 
 
 " Laughter belongs to man alone " (" Le 
 rire est le propre de I'homme ") — with these 
 words Frangois Rabelais (1445-1553) sounded 
 the knell of asceticism, damned Puritanism. 
 
 N 
 
194 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 and gave mirth its status in the world. He 
 proclaimed as his evangel " a certain gaiety 
 of spirit, conceived in scorn of chance. And, 
 if you ask me ' why ? ' good people, here is 
 the unanswerable answer : Such is the will 
 of the All -good and Omnipotent God, in which 
 I acquiesce . . . whose Gospel of good tidings 
 I worship." 
 
 But the gaiety could only spring from a 
 large charity. " Wisdom cannot enter an 
 unkind spirit, and knowledge without con- 
 science is the ruin of the soul." That saying 
 of Rabelais' is his corner-stone. " We estab- 
 lish sovereign good," he says, " not by taking 
 and receiving, but by giving with both hands. 
 There is only one thing that I dislike, and 
 that is contempt of the commonplace." 
 
 Rabelais, like Erasmus, was an escaped 
 monk; like Erasmus, he became the secretary 
 of a prelate— in his case the literary Cardinal 
 Du Bellay — and accompanied him to Rome; 
 unlike Erasmus, he became a doctor, and an 
 apostle of positive science. He was the first 
 man in France to brave the Pope by dissecting 
 a corpse — an heretical experiment considered 
 to interfere with the resurrection of the body. 
 This double life in him, that of the rebel monk 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 195 
 
 and of the doctor, gave him a new outlook 
 upon the universe. " Abandon yourself to 
 Nature's truths, and let nothing in this world 
 be unknown to you." Thus he exclaims in 
 chorus with all the great men of the Renais- 
 sance, but the road to truth that he chooses 
 is his own. " If," he says, " we would achieve 
 a sure and satisfying knowledge of the divine, 
 two things are necessary — God's guidance and 
 man's company." The Renaissance, when it 
 sought God, had hitherto sought Him through 
 the mind ; to seek Him through the heart, to 
 study human beings through sympathy, was 
 a fresh conception, fraught with fresh issues. 
 After thirteen years, Rabelais left the 
 monastery from disgust at monastic ignorance 
 and immorality. Still in his monk's dress, 
 he journeyed southward, enjoying the life of 
 tavern and roadside, equally at home in a 
 great lord's library or a clodhopper's hovel. 
 He wandered for six years over France, he 
 studied at the Universities, he learned dancing 
 at Toulouse and medicine at Paris. He 
 lectured at Montpellier, he practised there as 
 doctor of the hospital, he dissected at Lyons, 
 the home of enlightenment. Here it was 
 that, in 1533, was printed his Pantagricel, the 
 
196 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 " New Gospel " as, with true French acumen, it 
 was called at Court ; and it was followed later 
 by Gargantua (now the first " book ") and by 
 four more parts, the last of which was probably 
 left unfinished at his death and filled in by 
 another hand. At Lyons Cardinal Du Bellay 
 found him and thence took him to Rome, no 
 auspicious day for the ecclesiastical dignitaries, 
 who received their final place in his pages, 
 shut, parrot -like, in gilt cages, in his Island of 
 Papomanes. But he never left the Church, 
 and later was made Cure of Meudon, a position 
 the monotony of which he enlivened by many 
 absences. In 1552 he resigned this living, 
 and in the year following he died. 
 
 His massive philosophical fantasia, which 
 took nothing seriously but Truth and God, 
 that sound-humoured satire in the guise of 
 wonder -stories about giants such as he and 
 his public delighted in, created an epoch. 
 It was, as it were, a game of Titans, playing 
 at ball with rock-boulders, laughing that laugh 
 of the gods which means a thimderstorm for 
 man, a storm which clears the air. Not for 
 nothing was it called the " New Gk)spel." In 
 two months more copies had been sold than 
 copies of the Bible in nine years. Francis I 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 197 
 
 read with avidity, so did that far greater 
 light of letters, his sister, Marguerite of 
 Angouleme. The Court followed suit ; Panta- 
 gruelism became a recognized term for laugh- 
 ing work-a-day wisdom. It amused men 
 while it made them think, and the thoughtless 
 enjoyed the narrative for itself. The hostility 
 of the Church and the Sorbonne did not take 
 from its popularity, and the King's protection 
 secured the author from persecution. He 
 could always plead that he meant no more 
 than fiction and, under shelter, doubtless, of 
 this pretext, he even went so far as to dedicate 
 his second book to Pope Paul III. He had 
 no desire for martyrdom. " I am thirsty 
 enough by nature," he said, " without heating 
 myself any more." 
 
 Gargantua was born calling out for drink, 
 and Pantagruel is only satisfied by the wine 
 at the shrine of Bacbuc. Thirst is Rabelais' 
 constant note — ^intellectual thirst, moral thirst, 
 thirst for experience : in one word, thirst for 
 reality; and from that category, as he con- 
 ceived it, no natural appetite was excluded. 
 The " ante intellective,'''* as he called the soul, 
 was but the sovereign, ruling a commonwealth 
 of which such appetites were the needful 
 
198 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 proletariat. Sometimes Rabelais is conscious 
 of his allegory, sometimes he is not. He has 
 tried to cram the whole of life into his book, 
 and naive tales and subtle undercurrents lie 
 bedded in the inchoate mass. The first of 
 the books is the chronicle of the Giant Gar- 
 gantua, son of the Giant Grandgousier ; the 
 remaining four tell the education and adven- 
 tures of Gargantua's son. Prince Pantagruel — 
 also a giant — who in his manhood dares set 
 sail across the perilous seas to seek " the 
 Temple of the Divine Bacbuc," the far-off 
 shrine of Knowledge, where springs the 
 Fountain of magic wine which slakes the thirst 
 of those who have the coiu'age to find it. 
 Gargantua is less primitive than Grandgousier, 
 Pantagruel is more intellectual than Gargantua, 
 yet Gargantua's letter of advice to Pantagruel 
 is one of the noblest and warmest chapters 
 ever written upon education. It is the coping- 
 stone of Rabelais' huge construction. You 
 may find many other things by the way — ^his 
 own autobiography, the racy picture of his 
 times, of the students and lawyers and 
 apprentices; of the cities on the Loire and 
 beyond them — but the final impression is 
 that of his irony. 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 199 
 
 He runs full tilt against every kind of 
 sham and hypocrite. ''^ Moque Dieu prayers," 
 priests, grabbing attorneys, unjust judges in 
 fur-lined coats, fashionable doctors, pedants, 
 " fools elect " and " fools metaphysical," 
 come in equally for his lash. Fools, indeed, 
 with their punctilious shibboleths, had, he 
 thought, . worked more havoc in the world 
 than sinners. He is relentless in ridiculing 
 them through the mouth of Panurge, that 
 Falstaff of France, whom Pantagruel dis- 
 covers in rags and makes into his boon- 
 companion. If much that Panurge uttered 
 does not bear repetition, still at no time was 
 he without the touch of good fellowship. 
 His creator has been compared to Swift, but 
 no comparison could be more superficial. 
 Both men liked to give a spade a bad name, 
 but there the resemblance stops. Laughter 
 partakes of the nature of what is laughed at, 
 and that of Rabelais, never cynical, was not 
 directed at things which are really sacred, 
 only at things which are considered so. He 
 upheld the worth of mankind. Nowhere 
 does he do this more strongly than in his 
 picture of the Abbey of Thelema. Utopias 
 were in vogue in his day — ^an outlet for men's 
 
200 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 ideas on government and conduct conceived in 
 the true Renaissance spirit, with fact and fancy 
 richly intertwined, Hke the oak-leaves and 
 Centaurs on a doorway of the time. Plato's 
 Republic, together with the current tales of 
 new worlds, had moved men's imaginations. 
 
 It is interesting to place side by side the 
 three best-known examples of the sort : Sir 
 Thomas More's Utopia, Rabelais' Thelema, 
 and Bacon's New Atlantis. That by More is 
 the most classical and the most spiritual, 
 with its vast, dim church, large enough to 
 hold all who will pray to the "Unknown," 
 and its belief in a kind of aristocratic 
 socialism, not unlike that of Ruskin; the 
 Atlantis is the most scientific and intel- 
 lectual, with its seekers after knowledge, its 
 " merchants of light " and " merchants of mys- 
 tery" — ^founded, as it is, ostensibly, upon 
 Christianity, but more truly upon a Christian 
 theory approved by reason than upon a living 
 faith from within. It is Rabelais who puts 
 a heart into Nature, who brings a sense of 
 the artist's religion; as much as Donne or 
 Browning he declares the interdependence 
 of soul and body. His Utopian cloister for 
 men and women fulfils his hopes for the world. 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 201 
 
 Here the Renaissance lives side by side with 
 the new faith. Over its sculptured portal 
 was written ^' Fais ce que voudras'*^ ("Do as 
 you will "), the keynote of the Renaissance ; 
 and beside it was the motto of the new belief : 
 " Enter here, all ye who in your lives proclaim 
 the Gospel, fearless of men's hatred. Here 
 shall ye find a refuge and a fortress against 
 hostile error, which poisons the world. Enter, 
 I say, and found a deeper faith." Men and 
 women alike retired here to study together ; 
 they were dressed in rose and silver, their 
 staircases were of porphyry, they had libraries 
 and gardens. They lived with all their 
 faculties, they lived nobly, because " Free 
 people, well-born and gently nurtured, talking 
 together in goodly companies, have a natural 
 instinct, a spur which pricketh them on to 
 virtuous deeds and withdraweth them from 
 vice, and this spur is named Honour. These 
 same people, when by vile subjection and 
 constraint they are deformed and enslaved, 
 divert from its true course the noble affection 
 by the which they are willingly impelled 
 into goodness. For we always set forth on 
 forbidden enterprises and covet that which 
 is denied us. . . . The husbands and wives 
 
202 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 who chose each other freely at Thelema 
 loved each other at the end of their lives as 
 dearly as on the first day of their marriage." 
 
 We are reminded of Castiglione's liberty 
 which was " a bridle to intercourse," but 
 Rabelais cuts' deeper — Rabelais was religious. 
 His notions of sex, of life and death, and of 
 what comes after, are penetrated by a vital 
 faith, freethinking yet Evangelical,which gives 
 him a place apart. It was, in great measure, 
 his conviction that God is big enough to 
 hallow Nature that made him roll together 
 his finest thoughts and his grossest pothouse 
 indecencies: chaotic indecencies for the sake 
 of which he has been too much remembered 
 and too little explored. But his coarseness 
 never injured his soul or his vision of God. 
 
 " Go, my friends," says the priestess of 
 Bacbuc, " Go, in the keeping of that Intel- 
 lectual Sphere whose centre is everywhere, 
 whose circumference is nowhere, whom we 
 call God. The Egyptians hail their sovereign 
 Deity as the Abstruse — ^the Hidden One. And 
 because they invoked Him by this name, 
 entreating Him to reveal Himself to them. He 
 widened their knowledge of Himself and His 
 creatures, guiding them by His bright lantern." 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 203 
 
 " There is," says More in his U topi a, " a 
 certain godly power, unknown, everlasting, 
 incomprehensible, far above the reach and 
 capacity of man's wit, dispersed throughout 
 all the world, not in bigness but in virtue and 
 power — ^Him they call the father of all." 
 
 " Kings," writes Bacon, " could not obtain 
 a greater honour than to be God's playfellows 
 in that game (the game of knowledge); 
 considering the great commandment of wits 
 and means, whereby nothing needeth to be 
 hidden from them." ? 
 
 These three passages may stand as sum- 
 maries of these three men's conceptions of 
 the Eternal. Bacon sees no way thither but 
 that of knowledge and human pride. More 
 chooses the road of worship and of charity. 
 So does Rabelais, but with a difference. He 
 adds to his other aspirations an intellectual 
 thirst as strong as that of Bacon, and he does 
 what no other sixteenth-century thinker 
 succeeded in doing — he makes of religion an 
 essence, not an idealized code or custom. 
 Life is his Church, larger than any building, 
 however large, and worship there is perpetual, 
 
 Christ's Christianity seemed to him the 
 faith to steer by, " I reverence," he said. 
 
204, THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 "that Holiest Word of Good Tidings, the 
 Gospel, as it first stood written." Christ is 
 " the Saviour King, in whom all oracles, all 
 prophecies found an end — just as the skulking 
 shadows vanish at the light of the clear sun.'* 
 
 " Pan is dead ! " cries a voice only heard 
 by Pantagruel's pilot, as he steers the ship 
 amidst the Grecian isles. " All the same," 
 says Pantagruel, " I interpret this to mean 
 that great Saviour of the faithful, who was 
 slain shamefully in Judea through the envy 
 of the Pontiffs, the Doctors and the Monks. 
 He can well be called Pan, seeing that He is 
 our all. All that we are, all that we live, all 
 that we hope is Him, in Him, by Himc He 
 is the good Pan, the great Shepherd, who . . . 
 loveth not only His sheep but His shepherds." 
 
 Rabelais believed in the permanence of the 
 soul. " I have faith," he wrote, " that all 
 thinking souls are beyond the power of the 
 scissors of Fate." " All are alike immortal," 
 inheritors of " the sweet felicity prepared by 
 the good God for His faithful . , c the Life 
 of Immortality." 
 
 Yet he chose no high-sounding way to this 
 felicity. He disliked ambition almost as 
 much as asceticism. " Let those who will," he 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 205 
 
 says, " dispute about happiness and sovereign 
 good; but it is my opinion that whosoever 
 planteth cabbages, findeth instant happiness." 
 The Via Media was the rottd he acknowledged 
 and he raised it to a noble level. " I have," he 
 wrote, "this hope in God . . . that He will fulfil 
 our vfishes, provided that they are lowly . . „ 
 Wish, then, for what is moderate. It will 
 surely come to you, and with all the better 
 cheer, if you toil and work while you are 
 waiting. ' All very well,' you say, ' but God 
 might just as well have given me sixty 
 thousand as the thirteenth part of one half. 
 For He is onmipotent.' ' And who taught 
 you, poor people, thus to argue and prate 
 about the power ... of God? Humble 
 yourselves before His Holy Face and acknow- 
 ledge your imperfections." 
 
 It has seemed wise to dwell thus long 
 upon Rabelais, because he is both typical 
 and unique — the man who was most and 
 least of the Renaissance. In one way he 
 is, indeed, hostile to it. His work was anti- 
 classical; it sounded the first note of the 
 Romantics. Antiquity, tradition, were no- 
 thing to him, life was everything. Even 
 intellect was secondary to life. The very 
 
206 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 manner in which his book was written, jotted 
 down, he tells us, at the dinner-table, in the 
 intervals of eating, is almost a stab at pre- 
 cedent, a sign of spontaneous growth and 
 force. Rabelais was the forefather of Moliere ; 
 he was, also, in his lavish abundance, his 
 extravagance in words, his lack of the unities, 
 the ancestor of Victor Hugo and of all such 
 writers as freed themselves from the canons 
 of French Academies. 
 
 In so far he was of a later time, but none 
 the less was he a man of the Renaissance. 
 And in a peculiar sense. For he alone seems 
 to sum up the movement in all its aspects. 
 He was an educationist; a naturalist as 
 studious of birds and shells and plants as 
 Leonardo; a man of science and, like Bacon, 
 the precursor of modern men of science; a 
 spiritual idealist, a votary of common sense. 
 He joined in himself the distinctive qualities 
 both of Bacon and of Montaigne. Bacon 
 imperially said, " I take all knowledge for 
 my province," and despised small things. 
 Montaigne was content with planting cab- 
 bages, and censured distant vistas as ostenta- 
 tious. Rabelais was as intellectual as Bacon, 
 as modest and as practical as Montaigne. 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 207 
 
 Thus did Rabelais transform the traditional 
 religion of the Frenchman — ^the religion of 
 good sense and good humour, the cheerful 
 scepticism which sees and accepts things as 
 they are, and does not aim too high for success. 
 
 Michel De Montaigne, the first Essayist 
 (1533-1592), had no wish to transform it, he 
 only developed it to the full and applied it 
 with unbounding sincerity, thus presenting 
 the world not with new thought, but with 
 old thought looked at by a new thinker. His 
 Essays, first published in 1595, under the 
 guise of easy talk and anecdote, were the 
 exposition of a philosophy made up of ele- 
 ments apparently inimical. Montaigne was 
 both Epicure and Stoic. Eat and drink, he 
 said, for to-morrow you die, but eat and drink 
 wholesomely, and die with dignity. Life is 
 not happy, it is interesting. Therefore arm 
 yourself with endless curiosity and, if possible, 
 with intelligence. Read, learn, live, for the 
 sake of learning, reading, living. But do not 
 be intellectual, for the intellect is the seat of 
 arrogance. Humbly cultivate the power of 
 being amused. Study your fellow-man that 
 you may acquire the science of existence. 
 Preserve yourself; above all. know yourself. 
 
208 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Never seek to be much to your fellows, or to 
 do heroic deeds. " \Yho tries to play the 
 Angel, plays the beast." Take care not to 
 play the beast — for no moral motives, but 
 for the sake of reason and human dignity. 
 Right and wrong are dangerous words, 
 unrecognized by Nature, and Nature is the 
 great teacher. Biit vice is unwholesome, 
 violence inconvenient, cruelty inhuman and, 
 alone, unpardonable. . For the rest. Nature 
 spreads out before your eyes an infinite book. 
 Master it untiringly, tabulate with indiffer- 
 ence, but do not judge. Before everything, 
 throughout your life, be natural, avoid frills 
 and furbelows, say what you mean. In 
 education, also, follow Nature as far as possible. 
 Pedants are the worst fools because they are 
 pretentious; hypocrites and martyrs are to 
 be eschewed. As for religion, since we can 
 know nothing and truth unknown is truth 
 improbable, let us get rid . of worry at the 
 outset and believe everything. / , 
 
 Yet, at the same time that he preached this 
 doctrine, he confessed to his constant use of 
 the Lord's Prayer. A sceptic he was, not a 
 materialist. Whoever would understand his 
 attitude must read his Apologie de Raimond 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 209 
 
 Sebond, the longest of his Essays, in which he 
 sets forth all his belief in the natural and all 
 his disbelief in the supernatural, his rejection 
 of miracles and of man's immortality, of 
 cant and of all extreme opinions. Where 
 Rabelais put charity, Montaigne substituted 
 tolerance; where Rabelais hoped, Montaigne 
 endured. He searched out Nature, he ac- 
 knowledged her credentials, as jealously as 
 Rabelais or Bacon. He created no Thelema, 
 but he would have enjoyed living there. 
 " Those do wrong," he writes, " who wish to 
 disjoin our two great halves . . . our soul 
 must be commanded not to draw aside, not 
 to despise and desert the body." Both soul 
 and body should work for one end, our main 
 end, self-knowledge and self-dependence. 
 '' The greatest thing in the world," he says, 
 " is to know how to belong to oneself." 
 
 Montaigne's life accorded with his creed. 
 He spent his most fruitful hours with his 
 books, in the tower he built for himself as a 
 refuge from the disturbances of domesticity — 
 in that famous library where he had collected 
 round him the Ancients whom he loved. He 
 made a. kind, indifferent husband, a kind, 
 
 negligent father, a just master, a tolerably 
 o 
 
210 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 good Mayor of Bordeaux. His noblest years 
 were those of his romantic friendship for the 
 poet La Boetie, his only sorrow that for his 
 early death. He would have agreed with 
 much in Macchiavelli's Prince, yet his own 
 ideal sovereign was his much-loved guest, 
 Henri IV. 
 
 But Montaigne has a potent significance 
 outside his philosophy; he marked a fresh 
 stage in the life and scope of literature. He 
 was the first happy rambler among books, 
 the first desultory reader. And he provided 
 the first-fruits of desultory literature. He 
 invented the Essay, the loose cover for thought 
 and fancy. He used this new form to tell us 
 more about himself, his minutest habits, 
 tastes, and fancies, than perhaps any other 
 man has done ; and under its shelter he may 
 also be said to have invented the art of auto- 
 biography, the taste for personal detail, which 
 began the modern era and foreshadowed 
 modern psychology. With all his ardour for 
 the classics, he was, in his own way, as anti- 
 classical as Rabelais. A " modern " he re- 
 mains — ^the first critic who on any large scale 
 applied criticism to common life. 
 
 Bacon (1561-1626) was the first critic to 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 211 
 
 make discovery the principal goal of science. 
 His quest was " the inquiry of Truth, which is 
 the love-making or wooing of it ; the knowledge 
 of Truth which is the presence of it; and the 
 belief of Truth, which is the enjoying of it . . „ 
 Truth, which only doth judge itself." The 
 life of Bacon belongs mainly to the seven- 
 teenth century, and so, but for his first ten 
 Essays, does his work. The complete edition 
 of these only appeared in 1625, his Advance- 
 ment of Learning in 1605, his Novum Organum 
 in 1610. This, his chief book — ^the setting 
 forth of his great Inductive method, and only 
 the first instalment of his greater unfinished 
 project, the Instauratio, a survey of the whole 
 of knowledge — is therefore outside the bound- 
 aries of the Renaissance. Yet so much is 
 he the outcome of the movement, so much 
 its final expression, that a glance, however 
 cursory, at the position that he held seems 
 essential. 
 
 He was certainly of the Renaissance when 
 he ordered music in the next room to that in 
 which he meditated, and had flowers and sweet 
 herbs scattered on his dining-table, " to 
 refresh his spirits and memory." But he 
 seems beyond it when he already speaks of it 
 
212 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 as history — as " the time when it pleased God 
 to call the Church of Rome to account for 
 their degenerate manners " ; when also " it 
 was ordained by the Divine Providence that 
 there should attend withal a renovation and 
 new spring of all other knowledges." Never 
 has the glory of pure mind shone more resplen- 
 dently than in Bacon; his achievement was 
 instantaneous, whether in abstract thought or 
 in scientific experiment. Milton and Goethe 
 came near to him, but Milton had not so much 
 quicksilver, Goethe did not present so hard 
 a front. He owed little to writers of his 
 own day or before it. External influences he 
 underwent, and he acknowledges his debt to 
 Montaigne for the form of the Essay. But 
 that form he developed on his own lines, 
 very different from those of the Frenchman. 
 For though Bacon could alternate massive 
 state with flowing wit, and architectural 
 diction with light grace or terse conmient, 
 bringing " home " his subjects " to men's 
 businesse and bosomes " ; and though his 
 ease is amazing, it is always ease in full 
 dress, not the broad, arm-chair ease of 
 Montaigne. Bacon speaks with the tongues 
 of men and of angels, in a style which grows 
 
THINKERS OF THE RENAISSANCE 213 
 
 with the thought that prompted it till we 
 cannot tell which is which, a style which is 
 the voice of Truth made musical — but it is 
 a style of classical descent. 
 
 No less different is the colour of the two 
 men's minds. Bacon adored the intellect 
 that Montaigne discarded. It sometimes 
 seems as if that worship had absorbed all the 
 rest of the man — heart, honour, sincerity; 
 as if he were made of intellect alone. Such, 
 perhaps, is the key to his spirit. Humility 
 was not his; he saw God through man, not 
 man through God; like the Popes, he set up 
 a " Super-man " : but his was a Super-man of 
 the intellect and he called him indifferently 
 human or divine. Apart from intellect, he 
 knew no life worth living. " The truth of 
 being and the truth of knowing are one, 
 differing no more than the direct beam and 
 the beam reflected." And " knowing," which 
 springs from wonder, " the seed of know- 
 ledge," must be got for its own sake ; directly 
 " men fall to framing conclusions," harbouring 
 " weak fears or vast desires," there arise 
 " carefulness and trouble of mind " to ruffle 
 the waters and disturb the image. Rabelais 
 says, " Live and know " ; Montaigne says. 
 
214 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 " Look on and know " ; Bacon says, " Know." 
 He also says that " To spend too much time 
 in studies is sloth," and that they " are 
 perfected by experience " — but to him life 
 only meant extended knowledge, and know- 
 ledge must precede it. 
 
 Francis Bacon, philosopher and statesman, 
 with the " delicate lively hazel eie," which 
 Dr. Harvey said was " like the eie of a viper," 
 saw most things to be seen in the universe, 
 excepting the heart of his fellow-man. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 The French Renaissance lived its full life 
 
 and reached its zenith under its great patron, 
 
 Francis I, that rara avis, a king with the mind 
 
 of an artist. To his enthusiasm for building 
 
 are due not only Fontainebleau and Chambord 
 
 and much of the palace at Blois, but also 
 
 a great part of those enchanted chateaux of 
 
 the Loire erected by great nobles to follow 
 
 his example — stately homes and fortresses 
 
 in one, where cupids and epigrams carved in 
 
 stone decorate guard-rooms and garde-robes, 
 
 and politicians were provided with secret 
 
 chambers for eavesdropping, and courtiers 
 
 with winding, f hell -like stairways. The name 
 
 of Pierre Lescot (1510-1578) is inseparable 
 
 from the palace of the Louvre which he 
 
 began to reconstruct under Francis' orders; 
 
 that of the greater Philibert de I'Orme (3 518- 
 
 1570) from the palace of the Tuileries which 
 
 he built under Henri II, as well as Diane de 
 
 216 
 
216 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Poitiers' home at Anet. De TOrme alone of 
 artists in France recalls the many-sidedness 
 of Italy, and had mastered not only his 
 profession but the arts of writing and of 
 fortification. For the rest, what makes the 
 French Renaissance so distinct and self- 
 contained, as well as so much smaller than 
 that of Italy, is its restrictedness. The char- 
 acteristic search after Universality did not 
 tempt the precise and practical French mind, 
 which loves boundaries and prefers to con- 
 centrate on one spot rather than embrace 
 vast horizons. The nation that re-invented 
 Alexandrins could never have aimed at 
 Infinity, and its very limitations, preserving 
 tradition, no less fostered national growth. 
 " The French," wrote De I'Orme, " are so 
 constituted that they think nothing good 
 that doth not come from a foreign land . . < 
 there you have the French temperament . . . 
 mobile -minded and mercurial . . . The best 
 inspiration cometh from the things natural 
 to the country where one lives . . . and by 
 the reproduction of all things natural to 
 French soil and to the inclination of French- 
 men." The main trend of France was always 
 this — ^to put native wine in classic bottles 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 217 
 
 and to see that it did not burst them. It was 
 thus that Philibert, in spite of his wider 
 powers, made himself the worst foe of the camp 
 of Italian artists introduced by Francis, while 
 his doctrine, then and later, found active 
 support, notably among French sculptors. 
 
 Jean Goujon (d, 1564-1568) was the very 
 voice of France . Whoever has seen his Fontaine 
 des Innocents, the public fountain which he 
 made for Paris, will know why. The rhythmic 
 figures of 'his nymphs, bending, curving, 
 floating on aerial draperies, full of watery 
 enchantment — ^his Glory and his trumpet- 
 blowing Fame on the outer walls of the Louvre 
 — ^his reclining statue of Diana — ^are full of a 
 lyric elegance, of inborn style, of that kind of 
 spontaneous artificialness which a Frenchman 
 means by chic, Michel Colombe, his senior 
 but his contemporary, is also essentially 
 French. And he had been to Italy, had learnt 
 his craft in the Burgundian School of Dijon, 
 the town through which passed all travellers 
 between Italy and France. His chisel wrought 
 the famous church of Brou, in the forest of 
 Bourg-en-Bresse : the shrine of married love 
 built to perpetuate Margaret of Austria's 
 grief for the death of her husband, Duke 
 
218 THE RENAISSANCE | 
 
 Philibert of Savoy. The two tombs with 
 their recumbent figures — the Duke sentinelled 
 by sorrowing children holding his helmet 
 and his gauntlet, the Duchess wrapped in her 
 long hair beneath her canopy of pious, modish 
 little saints — are masterpieces of richly 
 wrought exactitude. Colombe foimded a 
 school at Tours, but it brought no pupil who 
 could rival him. And Germain Pilon, of a 
 later date, the sculptor laureate, as it were, 
 of Henri II, the maker of the stylish Graces 
 who bore the sepulchral urn which held his 
 heart, is already on the decadent path. The 
 nude figures of that period in France look as 
 if they were waiting for Parisian clothes; 
 they are devoid of permanent qualities. 
 
 In painting, also, the French could show 
 no name of the first order. There were crude 
 and pious artists of the fourteenth century 
 and, from the beginning of the fifteenth, there 
 flourished the Burgundian school — ^the group 
 that, under the patronage of the Dukes of 
 Burgundy, long the rulers of the Nether- 
 lands, was brought into such close relations 
 with the Flemings. Burgundian painting 
 may, indeed, be said to be an offshoot of 
 Flemish art, with that same French quality 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 219 
 
 of chic superadded; and that quality was so 
 prominent as to become distinctive and to 
 give to France her own pictorial brevet. Her 
 saints and Virgins are crisper and more lucid, 
 as it were more epigrammatic than those of 
 Flanders ; they, too, are prose, but prose that 
 sparkles. And there were painters outside 
 this influence — the greatest of them, Etienne 
 Fouquet, at Tours (d, c. 1480), the exquisite 
 illustrator of Chevalier's Livre (Theures, the 
 pages of which, marvels of limpid picture 
 narrative, are treasured at Chantilly and 
 Frankfurt, while his portraits in the Louvre 
 of Charles VIII and of Ursins remain to repre- 
 sent his achievement on a larger scale. And 
 portrait -painting it was which, after that, 
 absorbed the best powers of France and 
 proved to be the natural outlet for her critical 
 insight and accomplished sense of beauty. The 
 brilliant little canvases of Jean Clouet and of 
 his much greater son, Francois (d. c. 1584), with 
 those of Comeille de Lyon and Dumoustier, 
 show us, one after another, the personages of 
 their day : princesses with jewelled sleeves, and 
 white -hatted baby Dauphins, against bright 
 green backgrounds — masterly summaries of 
 character and of manners. 
 
220 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 If we turn from painters to men of learning, 
 their numbers, compared to those of Italy, 
 keep much the same proportion. Yet there 
 are enough to make a goodly harvest, and 
 if they were born later than the Italians, 
 perhaps because of that, they went deeper. 
 Foremost among them comes the illustrious 
 Budaeus, the Greek scholar and philologist, 
 the counsellor who helped Francis and his 
 sister to found the College de France, the 
 student so absorbed in gaining knowledge 
 that he forgot it was his wedding-day and 
 forsook his bride for his books. Or there 
 were the Estiennes, Robert and Henri, father 
 and son, Latinists of universal fame, forcing 
 even their household to speak Latin; or 
 Paradis and Vatable, versed in Hebrew; or 
 Fostel, the Orientalist, who dreamed that 
 Francis might reign as Emperor, uniting East 
 and West ; or Amyot, the Greek professor, who 
 as a student nearly starved in a Paris garret, 
 and was only kept alive by the weekly loaf 
 that his mother sent him from the country. 
 
 As for poets, there were swarms of buzzing 
 academic bees, industriously rhyming upon 
 Love sacred and profane, and the like hack- 
 neyed themes. But the only name worth 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 221 
 
 remembering in the first half of the sixteenth 
 century is that of Clement Marot, the writer 
 of natural poetry as opposed to that of 
 erudition, and in so far the successor of the 
 bigger Fran9ois Villon (1431 — ?), and of 
 the more attractive Charles d' Orleans (1391- 
 1465). Of these, Marot*s two predecessors, 
 Villon marked an epoch. He knocked down 
 tradition; he was the literary ancestor of 
 Rabelais, the poet of instinct, the lover of the 
 roadside, the adventurer of unbridled tongue 
 and pungent satire, the scamp that Rabelais 
 never was — whose Ballade des Pendus, and 
 Ou sont les neiges d'Antan ? sounded the 
 first note of a great national poetry. ^ Charles 
 d'Orleans, for twenty-five years the prisoner 
 of Henry V in England, and later the successor 
 of his father, Louis, the murdered Duke of 
 Orleans, had a slighter reputation than Villon, 
 But he had the gift of magic that haunts the 
 spirit, and the love of nature that endears, 
 and his Ballades and Rondeaux will remain as 
 long as men love verse. Clement Marot 
 (1495-1544) is of lighter build; he has no 
 word for our hearts, but his grace, his fresh- 
 ness, his mundane gaiety, his Lines to the 
 parrots of princesses and to the princesses 
 
 .4 
 
222 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 themselves, his thistledown verse, and his 
 fashionable rhymed version of the psalms, 
 have a piquant charm which could belong to 
 no singer but a French one. 
 
 Nowhere, else were the poets, scholars, 
 artists, of that time more honoured than at 
 the Court of France. Louis XI, Charles VIII, 
 Louis XII, Francis I, were their protectors. 
 But they had a nobler guardian. The tutelary 
 spirit of the French Renaissance was a woman 
 — ^the sister of Francis, Marguerite D'Angou- 
 leme. Queen of Navarre. Herself a force in 
 literature, a poet, a romancist of no mean 
 order, she seems to stand forth as the type 
 of the multi-coloured contrasts of her day. 
 She wrote the Heptameron, that volume of 
 Mid-Renaissance stories told in summer 
 meadows by a. summer company of lords and 
 ladies, tales as ribald as those of her model, 
 Boccaccio ; no less did she write her abstruse 
 Mirror of a Sinful Soul and her spiritual 
 hymns. Artist and mystic, a heretic charged 
 by the Sorbonne who yet remained within 
 the Church, a fighter, a Reconciler, a scholarly 
 and deeply read woman, the cherished corre- 
 spondent and disciple of Erasmus — ^all these 
 seeming paradoxes of her nature were bound 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 223 
 
 together by her broad humanity. She should 
 have been painted as a kind of intellectual 
 Madonna beneath whose outspread mantle 
 was sheltered every needy person of the time. 
 Reformers, poets, scholars, from Rabelais, 
 Budaeus, Amyot, to the humblest refugee — 
 no one appealed to her in vain. 
 
 She was distinguished from her country- 
 women in that her power was due to what 
 she was, rather than to what she did. The 
 French ladies of the Renaissance who, even 
 more than the Italians, quickened the social 
 arts, showed one marked difference from these. 
 They were eminently practical ; their learning 
 and culture were directed to some definite 
 end. The " Flying Squadron " of beauties 
 and wits organized by Catherine de' Medici 
 was nothing more than a secret political 
 agency working systematically through charm. 
 Jeanne d'Albret, the daughter of Marguerite, 
 was a practical Reformer and propagandist ; 
 so was the older princess, Calvin's pupil, 
 Renee of Ferrara. Diane de Poitiers, the 
 mistress of Henri II, was born a governess 
 and an organizer; while the Reine Margot, 
 wife of Henri IV, a deep reader and a vivid 
 autobiographer, was also a politician of end- 
 
224 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 less intrigues ; and Louise Labe, the poetess 
 of Lyons, whose sonnets strike a note of 
 natural passion very rare in her day, figured 
 hardly less as an advanced feminist and a 
 military tactician. Marguerite d'Angouleme 
 alone among them could have sincerely said 
 that " she found it enough to exist." 
 
 She did not live to see the work of the 
 great French poets of her century. It was 
 for Marguerite de Savoie, her niece and a 
 weaker version of herself, to be the patron of 
 the Pleiade, that group of seven poets who 
 inaugurated a new poetic era. They were 
 led by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) and 
 by Joaohim Du Bellay (1525-1560); and this 
 movement which renewed French poetry 
 might never have been but for the lucky 
 chance of a meeting at a country inn, where 
 Ronsard, the princely poet bred at Court, 
 met Du Bellay, the Cardinal's poor relation. 
 Here it was that they sat and talked about 
 poetry, and laid down the lines of their 
 project — ^the revival of the French language, 
 
 Ronsard was an aristocrat, seventeenth 
 cousin to Queen Elizabeth, who sent him a 
 diamond ring. He had spent his boyhood as 
 page to the Duke of Orleans ; had gone twice 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 225 
 
 to Scotland, the first time in the train of 
 James V, bridegroom of Madeleine de France. 
 But greater to him than these outward 
 incidents was his discovery, when fifteen years 
 old, of Virgil — the event that decided his 
 career. He became enamoured of the classics, 
 went to Paris to learn, and was lucky enough 
 to come across Dorat, a pedagogue poet, a 
 real scholar, who was then absorbed in starting 
 a new scheme of classical education. This 
 scheme was embodied in his College de 
 Coqueret, where Ronsard presently read 
 iEschylus, acted Aristophanes, meditated on 
 the future of literature. With Du Bellay for 
 a colleague, his aims became more clearly 
 defined. The two poets were one in purpose. 
 Poetry, they thought, was dying of tradition 
 and of a limited vocabulary. If it was to 
 live, new words must be imported — ^from the 
 classics, from French itself: names of crafts, 
 technical terms, words of all sorts, from high- 
 roads as well as from libraries ; and these they 
 proceeded to throw into enchanting form, 
 subtle, sinuous, silvery, to measures light- 
 footed and flexible, like the dance of nymphs 
 and dryads in classic groves. The Ancients 
 were their models, but they adapted them 
 
226 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 to present needs. Ronsard's poems to forest 
 fountains and past loves are the exact counter- 
 parts of Goujon's sculpture; his picture of 
 himself in the woods, book in hand, followed 
 by his page with a basket of peaches, is the 
 perfectly wrought image of sixteenth century 
 enjoyment; of a Nature which becomes 
 charmingly elaborate, and an elaborateness 
 which grows charmingly natural. 
 
 Du Bellay's poems, though kindred in aim, 
 strike a deeper note. Like Ronsard, Du 
 Bellay was an aristocrat, but, unlike Ronsard, 
 he had known poverty, struggle, constant 
 bodily suffering. Those sonnets of his sug- 
 gested by Rome, finer French sonnets than 
 had yet been written, are nobler, if less perfect 
 than Ronsard's verse. They breathe a strain 
 transcending Renaissance Paganism, a sense 
 of the mortality of man's empire and the 
 immortality of his spirit. And he can deal 
 in lighter strains that delight us from pure 
 melody. His masterpiece is, perhaps, his 
 Vanneurs, the elusive, magic lyric of the 
 winnowers, which blends their pastoral sounds 
 with the rhythmic motion of figures on a 
 classic vase — a marble copy of some antique 
 dug up in the field of a Cardinal. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 227 
 
 Their manifesto was published in 1550, 
 in the shape of Du Bellay's Illustration de 
 la langue francaise. " The noblest work of 
 their (the Romans') State . . . could not 
 hold out against the blows of Time without 
 the aid of their language," says the author. 
 " Are we then less than Greeks or Romans 
 that we make so little of our own tongue . . . 
 the wide plains of Greece and Rome are 
 already so full that little empty space is left. 
 But, great God, what an infinity of sea there 
 still remains before we can anchor in port ! . . . 
 March then courageously, ye Frenchmen . . . 
 sow, I pray you ... a fresh crop — ^the 
 famous race of the Gallo- Greeks. Pillage 
 without conscience the sacred treasures of the 
 Delphic Temple." 
 
 The exquisite precision which the Pleiade 
 demanded found no favour in the literary 
 world. All the poets of the old school rose 
 against them; matters were not improved 
 by a volume of Ronsard's poems, and another 
 of Du Bellay's, which appeared shortly after, 
 and it was not till Marguerite de Savoie took 
 them under her protection that their reputa- 
 tion was established. Du Bellay had had 
 but time to print his Antiquites de Rome and 
 
228 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 his Regrets, when Death cut short his career. 
 But Ronsard continued to send forth poems 
 amid growing acclamations. He became the 
 spoilt child of the Muses; honours flowed in 
 upon him. He was appointed to be Mary 
 Stuart's tutor; Charles IX could not do 
 without him; he was adulated, caressed. 
 But his task was accomplished, his mother- 
 tongue permanently enriched, the fortunes 
 of poetry transformed. And he aimed high. 
 " Nourish lofty conceptions," he said, " such 
 as do not drag upon the earth." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 
 
 Ronsard's exhortation would have been 
 needless in England. There feeling came 
 before form and moulded form in the fire of 
 its own intensity, allowing the heat to shape 
 and modify each curve; too often, perhaps, 
 superimposing ornament, in the shape of 
 conceits and eupheuisms, unlike the methods 
 of the French, who, perfect in the jeweller's 
 art, first fashioned their exquisite crystal 
 goblet and then poured in their sparkling 
 Hippocrene. 
 
 In the Renaissance of England, both in its 
 power and its limitations, we see what seems 
 to be the strangest version of the movement. 
 There was no painting and no sculpture ; for 
 modern efforts to establish English- schools of 
 either art in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
 turies have met with small success ; and such 
 works of distinction as remain belong to the 
 
 school of Holbein, or to that of the Italian 
 
 229 
 
230 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 sculptor, Torrigiani, or to some other foreign 
 influence ; while the revival of architecture, in- 
 spired by Inigo Jones, only began in the reign 
 of James I. On the other hand, Englishmen 
 could boast a poetry, a drama, a prose, un- 
 rivalled by any nation then or afterwards — 
 of a sudden splendour and fertility whi<3h 
 can only be compared to the outburst of art 
 in Italy. In the England of the sixteenth 
 century the names of writers who have 
 endured stand as thick as the names of 
 painters and sculptors of the Cinquecento. 
 
 In the case of music, also, great things were 
 done. Never, before or since, has England given 
 the world so many composers. The fortunes 
 of music were in that day closely linked with 
 those of poetry. Dowland, Morley, Orlando 
 Gibbons, Weelkes, Wilbye, created the madri- 
 gal, as the Elizabethan poets evoked the sonnet. 
 Byrd and Tallis and John Bull lent their 
 lustre to church music. To The Triumphs 
 of Oriana — a collection of songs — twenty com- 
 posers contributed. And apart from their 
 own art, they must have had a striking effect 
 on verse; they suggested metres, perhaps 
 even subjects ; they inspired, as they in their 
 turn were inspired by, the lyric masters 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 231 
 
 around them. " He cometh to you," says 
 Sidney of the poet, " with words, either 
 accompanied with or prepared for the well 
 inchaunting skill of Musicke." 
 
 Yet, even so, the glory of these musicians 
 paled before that of literature. And in the 
 very scholarship of England, it is noteworthy 
 that its lasting fruits were literary, not 
 scientific. What remains is not Lilly's once- 
 famed Latin Grammar, or George Buchanan's 
 Latinity, or Roger Ascham's learning, but 
 North's Plutarch and Chapman's Homer and 
 Phaer's Virgil, those vivid translations which 
 brought the classics within the reach of every 
 reader and influenced the imagination of men, 
 from Shakespeare downwards. 
 
 Of the writers of that golden period — poets, 
 dramatists, prosodists, theologians — many, 
 transcending any period, belong to all time. 
 The name of Shakespeare transcends place 
 also, and belongs to the world; while the 
 crop of second- and third-rate stars, unrivalled 
 for its richness, becomes, like the rest, a part 
 of our national heritage, rather than part 
 of a great movement. Their works and their 
 lives make an essential element of our educa- 
 tion, and it would be superfluous to touch upon 
 
232 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 them here except as they were affected by the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 These great men brought new bullion into 
 English literature ; they virtually created the 
 English sonnet, the English song, the English 
 drama. Song and drama had existed before 
 them, but it was they who gave the form which 
 made their work an enduring possession for 
 other ages. Sir Thomas Wyat (1503-1542) 
 and the Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547), both 
 travellers in Italy, imported the Petrarchan 
 sonnet into their native country and in- 
 augurated the reign of the lyric — ^that in- 
 finitely various growth, many coloured, many 
 scented, fresh, luxuriant, the flower of an 
 infinitely various experience. Tottell's Mis- 
 cellany^ an anthology of poems practically 
 written between 1537 and 1557, proves how 
 suddenly, how generously, the art of poetry 
 developed. The slender volume contains the 
 work of a little group of singers of whom 
 Wyat and Surrey are the chief. The metres 
 here shown already give rich evidence of the 
 richer summer to come ; their simpler curves, 
 their lilt, their measures, are the first signs of 
 the falling cadences and wreathed interlacings 
 of fifty years farther on. But the real growth 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 233 
 
 was one of range, of increased emotional 
 capacity; and the metrical development was 
 but an answer to the need for a more manifold 
 expression, to the insistent new life crying 
 out for new forms of adequate beauty. 
 The Elizabethans knew instinctively that life 
 is greater than art, that art can only live in 
 so far as it interprets life. Such knowledge 
 was no part of the equipment of the Pleiade, 
 To them art was the accompaniment, not the 
 interpretation of existence. Nevertheless, it 
 must not be forgotten that though England 
 shaped her new forms according to her widen- 
 ing necessities, she shaped them upon patterns 
 with which Italy first, and in later days France, 
 provided her. She moulded them to those 
 necessities, she infused them with her qualities, 
 till they became her own. Yet, initially, she 
 owed these nations a debt. 
 
 The debt, however, has been exaggerated. 
 The game of influences is a dangerous one, 
 amusing for experts, but comparatively un- 
 essential. That which matters in art and 
 character is what we make of the influences, 
 what changes we undergo as we go on. Thus 
 disputes about the comparative degrees of the 
 effect of France or Italy upon us bring about 
 
234 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 little more than interesting investigation. 
 What stands out is the generous, imaginative 
 prose and poetry which was before them, and 
 will be after. 
 
 But England would not have been of her 
 day had she not delighted in experiments, 
 metrical and verbal — ^in eupheuisms — in every 
 kind of intellectual pastime. And she did 
 so with valuable results. If Wj^at wrote our 
 first sonnet, Surrey gave us our first blank 
 verse. From that time onwards, the work 
 of transmutation was ceaseless. The Pet- 
 rarchan sonnet was wrought upon, trans- 
 formed, till the hands of Sidney and of 
 Shakespeare perfected the English sonnet, 
 with its laws less mechanical and more elastic 
 than those of Petrarch's school; with the 
 prominence of the final two lines, which are 
 the climax and the summary of the whole. 
 
 The sonnets became an exercise, a fashion, 
 as much as did the writing of elaborate letters 
 in the France of the eighteenth century. 
 Every rhymer tried his hand, and though, as 
 in the period of Sensibility, this glib endeavour 
 produced much academic work, it gave the 
 real poets an ease and an agility, a power 
 of swift concentration, unparallelled in his- 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 235 
 
 tory. Shakespeare's passion, with its myriad 
 beauty-reflecting images; Spenser's intellec- 
 tual majesty, robed in glistening embroideries ; 
 Daniel's high-pitched Platonic conceits ; Dray- 
 ton's emotional power, drew to a point and, 
 within the prescribed fourteen lines, lived, as 
 it were, a full life in a day. Sidney's Stella 
 and Astrophel, Daniel's Delia, Drayton's Idea, 
 Spenser's Amoretti, all of them sonnet- 
 sequences, came out between 1591 and 1595; 
 while 1597 saw the first manuscript version 
 of Shakespeare's Sonnets. , 
 
 A new spring was given to the poetic life 
 of England by Sir Philip Sidney's Apology 
 for Poetry, which was not printed till 1595, 
 although written in 1581, to emulate, in some 
 sort, the " Defense " of Du Bellay. Sidney's 
 treatise is also a manifesto — a kind of banner 
 of the Renaissance for the poets to march 
 under. But its subject is very different, 
 and very characteristic of England. Sidney 
 defends poetry as a moral asset for the nation, 
 the finest of its possessions. 
 
 He is soaked in Plato, but his Platonism is 
 that of the Reformation, deeply concerned 
 with conduct. The classics he chiefly values 
 as models for behaviour, and to him learning 
 
236 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 is a " purifying of wit, enriching of memory, 
 enabling of judgment and enlarging of con- 
 ceyt," whose " final end is to lead and draw 
 us to as high a perfection as our degenerate 
 soules made worse by their clayey lodgings 
 can be capable of." And learning is not all : 
 " Sometimes the prettie tales of wolves and 
 sheepe can include the whole considerations 
 of wrong-doing and patience." Apollo was 
 with Sidney when he knew it not, and his love 
 of beauty existed for its own sake. " Nature 
 never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry 
 as divers Poets have done — neither with 
 pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling 
 flowers ; nor whatsoever else may make the 
 too much loved earth more lovely." 
 
 His definition of poetry is a wide one. It 
 includes all fiction — or " fayning " as he has 
 it — ^the Parables of the Gospels and More's 
 Utopia, no less than verse. " Certainly even 
 our Saviour Christ could as well have given 
 the moral common-places of uncharitableness 
 and humbleness, as the divine narration of 
 Dives and Lazarus, but that his through- 
 searching wisdom knew the estate of Dives 
 burning in hell, and of Lazarus being in 
 Abraham's bosome, would more constantly 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 237 
 
 inhabit both the memory and judgment.'* 
 To allure, to haunt, to edify the spirit — such 
 was the mission of poetry as Sidney conceived 
 it ; and it is the power to haunt which makes 
 the poet so much stronger than the philo- 
 sopher. " With a tale forsooth he cometh unto 
 you : with a tale which holdeth children from 
 play, and old men from the chimney-corner." 
 Sidney unconsciously discovered the inner 
 secret of art. "To be mooved to do that 
 which we know. Hie opus : Hie labor est," 
 
 His contemporary, Richard Hooker, had 
 found it also. Church music, he says, " doth 
 much edify — if not the understanding, because 
 it teacheth not, yet surely the affection, 
 because therein it worketh much." Sidney's 
 other prose masterpiece, the Areadia, a Court 
 idyll and romance, sown here and there with 
 stray blooms of verse, belongs to the general, 
 his Apology to the English Renaissance. Hence 
 it has seemed best to dwell upon it rather than 
 upon the enchanting pastoral. And the same 
 may be said of the starry poetry of Spenser i 
 of those two works, the Faerie Queene, and 
 the Hymne of Heavenly Beautie. The first is a 
 Christian allegory clothed in rich Renaissance 
 draperies; the last, a spiritual psalm, bright. 
 
238 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 like the missals, with golden borders full of 
 birds and beasts and flowers — a psalm trans- 
 lated into Platonic terms, adoring Unity and 
 raising man through beauty. But the spirit 
 of the Reformation pierces through. Spenser 
 had read the Bible and remembered it, even 
 in the full pomp of the mundane Epithalamion. 
 
 " Open the temple gates unto my love, 
 Open them wide that she may enter in " 
 
 recalls King David; while in the Hymn we 
 constantly find the form of Protestantism 
 beneath the sumptuous words. 
 
 " But lowly fall beneath His mercie-seate 
 Close covered with the Lamb's integrity. 
 From the just wrath of his avengeful threate 
 That sits upon the righteous throne on 
 
 high; 
 His throne is built upon Eternity, 
 More firm or durable than Steele or brasse, 
 Or the hard diamond, which them both doth 
 passe. 
 
 There in His bosome Sapience doth sit. 
 The soveraine dearling of the Deity, 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 289 
 
 Clad like a Queene in royall robes, most 
 
 fit 
 For so great powre and peerlesse majesty, 
 And all with gemmes and jewels gorgeously 
 Adorned, that brighter than the starres 
 
 appeare, 
 And make her native brightnes seem more 
 
 el ear e. 
 
 And looke at last up to that Soveraine 
 
 Light, 
 From whose pure beams all perfect beauty 
 
 springs. 
 That kindleth love in every godly spright, 
 Even the love of God; which loathing 
 
 brings 
 Of this vile world and these gay-seeming 
 
 things ; 
 With whose sweet pleasure being so possest 
 Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever 
 
 rest." 
 
 No Florentine, no Roman, no Frenchman, 
 could have used these words. A German 
 might have felt them, but he could not have 
 evolved the beauty wherewith to clothe them. 
 It is the distinction of England that she knew 
 
240 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 how to reconcile' art and faith, beauty and 
 religion. 
 
 For .Spenser is no isolated instance. The 
 poetry of Elizabethan England is deeply reli- 
 gious, and hence it acquires that profounder 
 interest, that enduring significance which 
 make it live for us of to-day when the con- 
 temporary poetry of other nations is for- 
 gotten, or of the past. You find the same 
 note in Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville, in 
 Southwell and Wotton, in Dekker and Shirley. 
 And foremost, perhaps, in Walter Raleigh, as 
 Evangelical as Spenser. Sometimes the strain 
 is metaphysical. Sometimes it is primitive 
 and human, as in Raleigh's cry of the heart — 
 
 " But from this earth, this grave, this dust 
 My God shall raise me up I trust." 
 
 or in his — 
 
 " Give me my Scallop-shell of quiet, 
 My staff of faith to walk upon. 
 
 My scrip of joy, immortal diet. 
 My bottle of salvation. 
 
 My gown of glory, hope's true gage ; 
 
 And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 241 
 
 Blood must be my body's balmer; 
 
 No other balm will there be given; 
 
 Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer, 
 
 Travelleth towards the land of heaven; 
 
 Over the silver mountains 
 
 Where spring the nectar fountains : 
 
 There will I kiss 
 
 The bowl of bliss 
 
 And drink mine everlasting fill 
 
 Upon every milken hill. 
 
 My soul will be a-dry before, 
 
 But after it will thirst no more." 
 
 Yet, a great, perhaps the greater part of our 
 poetry is far from being religious. We have 
 inherited from that day perhaps the wealthiest 
 love-poetry of modern Europe. None the less 
 it is full of a spiritual force which gives it 
 weight; of passion, which is the religion of 
 the heart. ^ . ^ 
 
 These sixteenth century lyrics of ours 
 breathe forth goodness rather than virtue, 
 worship rather than observance. We are 
 not Classics like the Pleiade. We are Roman- 
 tics, and the inspiration of English poetry 
 blows not from the past but from the present. 
 
 From Wyat's " Forget not yet my tried 
 Q 
 
242 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 intent " to Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Dray- 
 ton's " Since there's no help. Come let us kiss 
 and part," we can show lines the white heat 
 of which still has power to burn. Or else we 
 get intellectual fire from the highly wrought 
 sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney and the less 
 inspired work of Daniel. Everjrwhere there 
 is the sense of permanence, the absence of 
 the grace merely transient, and of an ornate 
 mythology. 
 
 A grace we have of our own, in odes and 
 songs and couplets and roundelays — invoca- 
 tions to Amaryllis and to Corydon, to You^h 
 and to the May, from the hands of Lodge and 
 Campion, Spenser, Drayton, and a score of 
 others; but it is a grace full of warmth and 
 shifting colour, not the clean-cut grace of the 
 classics. Everywhere there is spontaneous 
 growth, and nothing is more surprising than 
 the many different kinds of verse displayed — 
 sonnet, lyric, hymn, dramatic narrative, 
 dramatic song, each with its individual char- 
 acter sharply defined, even when the subject 
 is the same. If we take up Greene's So7ig 
 of Sephestia and Breton's Cradle-Song — both 
 tragic lullabies sung by deserted women — or 
 the numerous pastorals of the moment, the 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 243 
 
 distinctive quality of each poet stands out 
 in bold relief against the background of the 
 time. 
 
 All the Elizabethan qualities natural and 
 intellectual — passion, dramatic energy, lyric 
 force — were united in the last, and, after 
 Shakespeare and Spenser, the greatest singer 
 of the century, the first of the metaphysical 
 poets, John Donne (1573-1639), whose satires 
 and love-poems were mostly written by 1600. 
 His big words and big images, tense with 
 genius, bear the Elizabethan stamp, but his 
 thought, his conception of love, are of the 
 future. 
 
 " I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, 
 Who died before the god of love was born." 
 
 Such words have all the splendid emotion 
 of the morning. And to him, no sublimated 
 Platonist, but a believer in the senses, the 
 final miracle of love was the fusion of body 
 and soul. 
 
 " And whilst our souls negotiate there. 
 We like sepulchral statues lay ; 
 All day the same our postures were, 
 And we said nothing all the day. 
 
244 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 But O alas ! so long, so far 
 Our bodies why do we forbear? 
 They are ours, though not we ; we are 
 The intelligences,' they the sphere . . . 
 
 So must pure lovers' souls descend 
 To affections and to faculties 
 Which sense may reach and apprehend — 
 Else a great prince in prison lies." 
 
 Donne was a mystic of the senses ; passion 
 was his vocation, and only his own age could 
 have lent his tongue adequate expression. 
 " They are ours, though not we " — ^the phrase 
 sums up the outcome of the English Renais- 
 sance, the noble balance struck between sense 
 and spirit, the gift for that compromise which 
 is strength, not weakness. 
 
 The rhythm that was in all these poets, that 
 of fairy dance or stately march, did not con- 
 fine itself within poetic limits. Bacoix, Sidney, 
 Hooker, prove the contrary. Hooker's Eccle- 
 siastical Polity^ a treatise on Church govern- 
 ment, is in itself a triumphal progress of 
 language, and if anjrthing could have moved 
 the Puritans, it should have been his protest 
 against them. " The star of reason and 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 245 
 
 learning and all other suchlike helps, beginneth 
 no otherwise to be thought of than if it were 
 an unlucky comet." The words are fresh 
 from the mint — virgin words, untarnished 
 and intact, firm yet flexible, leaving a margin 
 for the imagination; and in that margin lies 
 the power of the writers of Elizabeth's day, 
 whether they wrote in prose or verse. 
 
 It was the power of the drama ; and among 
 the literary miracles of Elizabeth's reign that 
 drama was, perhaps, the greatest. Its sudden 
 outburst — ^the unaccountable change from the 
 wintry bud to the full blossom — is as inexplic- 
 able as the hidden germ that produced it. 
 We pass straight from Udall's clumsy Gammer 
 Gurion, the first comedy, and Sackville's 
 clumsy Gorboduc, the first tragedy, with their 
 crude types, " A Sycophant," or the like, 
 their bombastic villains and heroes, to the 
 subtle individuals of Shakespeare, Webster, 
 Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher; 
 to ^5 You Like It and Every Man in His 
 Humour and A New Way to Pay Old Debts; 
 to Hamlet and Othello, to The Duchess of Malfi 
 and The Maid's Tragedy, And this, while in 
 Italy and France there was practically nothing 
 of worth outside the classics — ^the plays of 
 
246 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Plautus and Terence, or else the modern 
 imitations of the Ancients; unless it were 
 for the slang satires and burlesques which 
 the students played in Paris, or the popular 
 Scripture pantomimes of Italy. Yet though 
 the quick harvest remains an ultimate mys- 
 tery, we can, without presumption, find a 
 few suggestive traces — aids to imagination 
 and comprehension, however partial and 
 inadequate these may be. 
 
 The romance deep-rooted in English soil 
 made us naturally discard the classical models 
 so dear to other countries. But not with- 
 out a struggle. War was waged between the 
 Classics and the Romantics ; between the 
 advocates of the Unities and their opponents ; 
 between the followers of Ben Jonson and 
 those of Shakespeare. The battle, however, 
 was not long protracted and the field remained 
 to the Romantics. There were profound 
 reasons for the fact. The same moral fervour 
 which lent significance to our poetry was at 
 work in our drama. It centred interest upon 
 character, it concentrated imagination upon 
 the subtle interplay of moral forces : upon con- 
 trast and conflict and the discrepancy between 
 body and spirit, between man's great possi- 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 247 
 
 bilities and his narrow limitations. To 
 this human pageant was added the gift 
 peculiarly ours among the nations — ^the price- 
 less gift of humour, which made us quick 
 to dive below the surface, to perceive these 
 incongruities and differences, to read and to 
 discern with sympathy. Sympathy is the 
 basis of the drama, and humour cannot live 
 without kindness. In the France of that day 
 we get pungent satire; but humour turns 
 satire into comedy, it ripens social ease and 
 social arts, and with them it ripens dramatic 
 art, that measuring-rod of social growth. 
 England has in truth the very gifts essential 
 to a great and free drama, the gifts that in 
 securer and less stirring times have sought 
 refuge in the novel. , 
 
 The English drama was born under a happy 
 star. English talents found the very atmo- 
 sphere to foster them and bring them to flower. 
 They were bathed in the sunlight of adventure. 
 While Shakespeare and his fellows were 
 maturing, Hawkins was exploring, Drake 
 made his three Homeric voyages to the Indies, 
 Raleigh discovered Virginia, Hakluyt wrote 
 his Voyages and Discoveries of the English 
 Nation. Amazing travellers' -tales were in 
 
248 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 everybody's mouth at a time when ereduUty 
 was as young and as elastic as the language. 
 There were other enterprises also to be shared 
 in at home and abroad — ^the Spanish wars, 
 the conquest of Ireland, the intrigues at 
 Court; there were other heroes — Essex, 
 Leicester, Sir Richard Grenfell, the Queen 
 herself. Men embarked in quest of emotional 
 experience as they embarked upon other 
 adventures. Nothing was set, all things were 
 possible. No wonder that imaginations were 
 inflamed and that the vast drama played in 
 the world without suggested the drama on the 
 stage within. 
 
 The names of the dramatists are legion; 
 they would have bulked large without Shake- 
 speare, and that he should have stood a head 
 and shoulders above them is only a measure 
 of his stature. Marlowe, earliest of them all, 
 cut off prematurely, the creator of Br. Fausius, 
 of Tamurlaine and Edward II, is apart from 
 the rest, a creature of half-fulfilled promise, 
 a lyric genius, a master of noble outlines. 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, with their Philaster, 
 Two Noble Kinsmen, A Maid^s Tragedy, are 
 perhaps the finest masters of their craft, 
 the suavest and the best proportioned; 
 
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 249 
 
 Webster, with his Duchess of Malfi and 
 Vittoria Corombona, is deepest in insight, 
 biggest in language. Ford, of The Broken 
 Heart, rivals him in tragic intensity and in 
 the power of working up a crisis; Massinger, 
 in his New Way to Pay Old Debts and his Duke 
 of Milan, stands out for sharp perception, for 
 the grasp with which he draws a thousand 
 web-like threads together. Dekker, Kyd, 
 Peel, Middleton, Marston, a throng of minor 
 names follow suit. All alike, in great or lesser 
 degree, bathed in the same generous noonday. 
 They mustered strong together, they kindled, 
 they drew forth one another; they answered 
 to the final roll-call on the victorious field of 
 the Renaissance. 
 
 In England that movement knew no decay ; 
 as in Germany, it was merged in the religious 
 question, and led straight on to the struggle 
 for civic freedom. There was no stagnation, 
 no rotting process. Far otherwise was it in 
 France and Italy. The last Medici were 
 corrupt despots, the last Valois corrupt mad- 
 men lapped in decadence; both were equally 
 enmeshed in petty intrigue and incapable of 
 larger statesmanship. Yet in each nation the 
 
250 THE RENAISSANCE 
 
 Renaissance lived on, as youth lives on in 
 each of us — to refresh our ageing spirits, to 
 remind, to urge, to inspire. The Renaissance 
 was the wellhead of revival; at that source 
 we can still drink to-day. 
 
BOOKS RECOMMENDED 
 
 Note. — All books that have been translated are marked 
 with an asterisk, or called by their English titles. Works 
 cited in text, or referred to below for general purposes, are 
 not cited again unless for a special reason. 
 
 For an introductory survey of the subject in its general 
 bearings read — 
 
 The Renaissance in Italy : Symonds ; The Cambridge 
 Modem History, I. Renaissance ; Renaissance und 
 Eumanismus in Italien und DeutschJand : Geiger ; 
 Histoire Universelle : Lavisse et Rambaud ; History of 
 the Papacy : Creighton ; Geschichte der Pav^ie : Pastor ; 
 Femmes de la Renaissance : Maulde de la Claviere. 
 
 For an introductory survey of the scholarly and artistic 
 life of the time — 
 
 Life and Letters of Erasmus : Froude ; Historical Lectures 
 and Addresses : Creighton ; Italian Painters and Early 
 Flemish Painters : (>owe and Calvacaselle ; Florentine 
 Sculptors of the Renaissance : Wilhelm Bode. 
 
 For more detailed study of the subject — 
 
 Modern Woeks (Historical) — 
 
 Florence : * Villari ; Geschichte der Pdpste* Vols. VII 
 and VIII : Pastor ; Geschichte der Piipste : * Ranke ; 
 Kultur der Renaissance in Italien : * Burckhardt ; 
 La Diplomatie Venitienne : Baschet ; Geschichte des 
 deutschen V dikes seit dem Au^gange, Vols. I-lV 3 
 Janssen.* Die Wiederhelebung des Classischen Alter- 
 thums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Eumanismus : 
 Voight. 
 
 251 
 
252 BOOKS RECOMMENDED 
 
 BlOQEAPHICAL AND LlTERAEY — 
 
 Lives of Lorenzo ie' Medici : Armstrong, Horseburgh, von 
 Beumont,* Roscoe ; Niccolo Macchiavelli : Villari ; * 
 Beatrice d'Este, Isabella -d'Este and Baldassare Castigli- 
 one : Julia Cartwright ; Life and Pontificate of Leo X, 
 and Vittoria Colonna : Mrs. Roscoe ; Lucrezia Borgia : * 
 Gregorovius ; Cesar Borgia : Gastine ; Giordano Bruno : 
 Frith ; The Renaissance : Walter Pater. 
 
 GoNTEMPOBAEY (Manners and Morals) — 
 
 Burchardus Diarium (Vol. I, translated) ; II Cortegiano : 
 Gastiglione (Florence, 1908), translated by Sir Thomas 
 Hoby into contemporary English : Introduction by 
 Walter Raleigh ; II Principe^ edited by L. A. Bui'd ; 
 Vite di Uomine illustri del Secolo XV : Vespasiano da 
 Bisticci ; Lives of the most eminent Painters, Sculptors 
 and Architects : Vasari (Bohn) ; Autobiography of 
 Benvenuto Cellini (Dent). Both invaluable foD atmo- 
 sphere, not for accuracy. 
 
 For contemporary thought on art, science, religion — 
 
 Literary works: Leonardo da Vinci (Richter, 1883); 
 Notebooks : Leonardo da Vinci (McCurdy, 1906). 
 
 For the art of the Renaissance — 
 
 Bryan's Dictionary of Painters ; A History of Painting in 
 Italy: Crowe and Calvacaselle j Italian Art: Julia 
 Cartwright (useful summary); Tiziano, Ja sua vita 
 e i suoi iempe : Crowe and Calvacaselle ; Les Arts a la 
 cour des Papes pendant le XV etleXVIieme eiede: 
 Emile Muntz ; Les Lues de Bourgogne : Essai sur les 
 lettresy les arts, etc., pendant le XVieme siede : Delaborde. 
 
 For more detailed criticism — 
 
 The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, The Venetian 
 Painters of the Renaissance, The Central Italian Painters 
 of the Renaissance i Berenson ; Donatello : Lord 
 Balcarres ; the monographs on artists in the Knackfuss 
 Series (Botticelli, Verocchio, Vinci, Michael Angelo, 
 etc.); Verocchio : Crutwell; Michael Angelo : Grimm; * 
 Michael Angelo: Holroydj Bellini: Roger IVy 
 (Artists Series) ; Raphael : Opp6i 
 
BOOKS RECOMMENDED 253 
 
 German — 
 
 Albert Dlirer : Sturge Moore ; Alhrecht DUrer : Ford 
 Heath (Great Artists Series) ; Altdorfer : Sturge Moore 
 (Artists Series); Holbein: Ford Madox Huefifer (Popu- 
 lar Library of Art) ; Deutsche Plastik im Mittdalter : 
 Max Sauerlandt. 
 
 Feench — 
 
 The French Renaissance : Mrs. Pattison ; French Painting 
 in the Sixteenth Century : Dimier ; Life of Philibert de 
 rOrme : Vaehon. Articles on Philibert de rOrme : 
 Reginald Blomfield in Architectural Review, February 
 and March, ,1904; Lea (Euvres de Palissy (Preface by 
 Anatole France). 
 
 GERMAmr ((General) — 
 
 Renaissance und Humanismus in Deutschland : (jieiger, 
 Berlin, 1882; Geschichte des deutschen V dikes eeit dem 
 Av^gange, Yols. I-IV: Janssen;* Works of Erasmus; 
 Life and Letters of Erasmus : Froude. 
 
 Feancb (Modern Historical) — 
 
 Eistoire de France, Vols. IX and X : Michelet ; Histoire 
 de France Vols. VIII and IX : Martin ; Francis I : 
 Paulin, Paris. (Contemporary records) : Relations 
 des Ambassadeurs Venitiem sur les affaires de France 
 au XV Heme siede : Tomasso, 1838; s La Diplomatic 
 Vinitienr^e : Baschet (dispatches from Venice to 
 France); (Euvres de Brantome, Vols. VII and IX: 
 Lalanne; Diaries and Memoirs of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries in the series of Memoirs (Petitot), 
 and of the Soci^te historique de France, especially 
 the Journals d'un bourgeois de Paris (in both series) 
 and the Journal de Pierre VEstoille <in latter series) ; 
 Memoires de Marguerite de Valois : Caboche. 
 
 (Literary) — 
 
 Tableau du XV Heme siecU : Ste. Beuve; Etudes litter- 
 aires : Bruneti(!;re ; Histoire de la Litterature franraise : 
 Rene Doumio. 
 
254 BOOKS RECOMMENDED 
 
 England — 
 
 Cambridge Modern History, I. ; History of England : 
 Froude ; Short History of the English People : Green ; 
 The Italian Renaissance in England : Einstein ; Queen 
 Elizabeth : Creighton ; The Courtships of Queen Eliza- 
 beth : Hume ; English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century : 
 Froude ; Principal Navigators : Hakluyt ; Great 
 Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century : Sydney Lee ; 
 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon : Spedding ; Bacon : 
 Church ; Old English Dramatists : Lowell ; Renaissance 
 Architecture in England : Blomfield ; Apdogie for 
 Poetry : Sidney ; Treasury of English Literature : 
 Hadow. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Ab61ard, 18 
 
 Agricola, Rudolph, 165, 174 
 
 Agyropulos. 37, 40, 63, 183 
 
 Afterti 32, 35, 56 f ., 65 
 
 Aldus Manutius, 17 
 
 Alexander oi Aphrodisias, 103 
 
 Altdorfer. Albrecht, 190 
 
 Amyot, 220, 223 
 
 Angelico Era 31, 36 
 
 Angelo, iVIichael, 7, 81, 95, 96, 
 
 106, 108, 113 f., 151 
 Angoulfeme, Margaret of, 197,222f. 
 Aquinas, Thomas, 103, 179 
 Aretino, Pietro, 135, 136, 143, 
 
 145 f ., 151, 154 
 Ariosto, Ludovico, 158 f. 
 Aurispa, 43 
 Averroes, 18, 102 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 171, 192 f ., 200, 
 203, 210 f . 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 20 
 
 Bandello, 158 
 
 Bellini, Giovanni, 81, 146, 187 • 
 
 Bembo, Cardinal, 100, 104, 135, 
 136, 137 
 
 Bessarion, Cardinal, 101 
 
 Bible, the, translations of, 168 
 
 Borgia Alexander, 107 f . 
 
 Borgia, Cesare, 98, 142, 143 
 
 Borgia, Lucrezia, 134 
 
 BotticeUi, Sandro, 25, 63, 66 f ., 78 
 
 Bracciolini, Poggio, 11, 43, 176, 177 
 
 Bramante, 119, 122, 123 
 
 BruneUeschi, 32, 34 
 
 Bruni, Leonardo, 43 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, 96, 161-162 
 
 Budseus, 220, 223 
 
 Buonarotti. C/. Angelo, Michael 
 
 Burcliiello, the " Rhyming Bar- 
 ber," 36 
 
 Burgundian school, the, 216 
 
 Cambio, 35 
 
 Castiglione, 135, 136, 137, 138, 
 
 140, 202 
 Cattaneo, Simonetta, 68 
 Caxton, William, 16 
 Cellini, Benvenuto, 152 f . 
 Church music, Erasmus on, 167 
 Clouet, Francois and Jean, 219 
 Colet, Dean, 168, 169, 176, 177, 
 
 179 f. 
 Colombe, Michel, 217 
 Colonna, Francesco, 77 
 Colonna, Vittoria, 125 f., 131 
 
 Constantinople, Patriarch of, 45 
 
 Correggio, 157 
 
 Cosimo, Piero di, 37 f., 44, 46, 80 
 
 Cossa, 81 
 
 Cranach, 190 
 
 David, Gerard, 172 
 Diane de Poitiers, 223 
 Donatello, 25, 31, 38 
 Donne, John, 243, 244 
 Drake, 15 
 
 Drama, Elizabethan, the, 245 
 Du BeUay, Joachim, 224 f . 
 DUrer, Albrecht, 167, 185, 186 
 
 Eastern and Western Churches, 
 
 the, 44 
 England, the Renaissance in, 170 
 Erasmus, Desiderius, 12, 166, 
 
 167 f ., 174, 194 
 Estes, the, 80, 132, 160 
 Estiennes, the, 12, 220 
 Eycks, Van, the, 19, 167, 172 
 
 Federigo of Urbino, 53, 54 f . 
 Feltre, cf . Raimboldini, Vittorino 
 
 da 
 Ficino, Marsilio, 26, 46, 63 f ,, 69 
 Fiesole, Mno da, 82 
 Florence, the Renaissance in, 25 f . 
 Flying-machines, invention of, 86 
 Fouquet, Etienne, 219 
 France, the Renaissance in, 170 
 Francesca, Piero della, 80, 148 
 Francis I., 215 
 Franco, Veronica, 146 
 
 Gama, Vasco da, 15 
 Gambara, Veronica, 132 
 Germany and the Renaissance, 
 
 1B4 
 Ghiberti, 32, 34 
 Ghirlandaio, 79 
 Giorgione, 148, 149, 150 
 Giotto, 19, 25, 29, 33 
 Goethe, 156, 212 
 Gonzagas, the, 51 f., 132, 134, 151 
 Goujon, Jean, 217 
 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 36, 79 
 Greek Testament, the, Latin 
 
 translation of, 168, 181 
 Greville, Fulke, 162, 240 
 Guicciardini, 144 
 Guidobaldo of Urbino, Duke, 132, 
 
 134 
 Guilds, Florentian, 32 
 
 265 
 
256 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Holbein, Hans, 190 
 Hooker, Richard, 237, 244 
 Hutten, Ulrich von, 169, 183, 184 
 
 Italy and the Eenaissance, 22 f . 
 
 Jews, the, and religious tolera- 
 tion, 184 
 Jones, Inigo, 230 
 
 Kempis, Thomas h, 165, 166 
 Kraft, Adam, 191 
 
 Laetus, Pomponius, 101 
 
 Lamartine, 156 
 
 Landino, Cristoforo, 63 
 
 Langland, 21 
 
 Lateran Council of 1513, the, 104 
 
 Linacre, 177 
 
 Lippi, Filippo, 36 
 
 Lorenzo fhe Magnificent, 28, 
 
 60 f ., 117 
 Luther, Martin,27,28,165,170,185 
 
 MacchiaveUi, Niccolo, 96, 140 f . 
 Mantegna, 80, 133 
 Marot, C16ment, 13, 221 
 Materialism, da Vinci and, 91 f . 
 Matsys, Quentin, 173, 187 
 Matteo del Palmieri, 78 
 Medici, the, 13, 28, 29, 76, 96, 
 
 144, 223 
 Melancthon, Philip, 185 
 Memling, Hans, 172 
 Milton, John, 165, 212 
 Montaigne, Michel.de, 171, 192, 
 
 207 f . 
 More, Thomas, 170, 176 f ., 200 
 Miiller, Johann, 174 
 Musicians, English, 230 
 
 New Testament, Latin transla- 
 tion of, 168, 181 
 Nicoli, Niccolo dl, 43 
 
 Orleans, Charles of, 221 
 
 " Parliament of Prelates," the, 45 
 Petrarch, 20, 166 
 Pfefferkorn, 183, 184 
 Philibert de I'Orme, 215 
 Physical science and the Renais- 
 sance, 15 
 Pico della Mirandola, 70 f . 
 Pisanos, the, 19, 29, 33 
 Plethon, Gemistos, 44, 46 
 Poitiers, Diane de, 223 
 Pole, Cardinal, 124 
 
 Poliziano, 13, 69, 72, 76 
 
 Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 80 
 Pomponazzo, 102 f . 
 Postel, the Orientalist, 220 
 Printing, discovery of, 9, 16 f. 
 Pulci, Luigi, 13, 62, 77 
 
 Quintilian's InstUiUions, 11 
 
 Rabelais, 22, 171, 192, 193 f. 
 Raimboldini, Vittorino (da 
 
 Feltre), 48 f. 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 240 
 Raphael, 95, 108 f ., 148, 187 
 Religion and the Renaissance 
 
 164, 249 
 Reuchlin, 183, 184 
 Robbias, the, 32, 36 
 Romano, Giiilio, 157 
 Rome, Popes of, 42, 44, 94 1. 
 Ronsard, Pierre de, 224 f . 
 
 Sadoleto, "the Christian CardK 
 
 nal," 97 
 Sangallos, the, 106, 128 
 Sarto, Andrea del, 148, 157 
 SchiUer, 156 
 
 Slialcespeare, 22, 231, 246, 248 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 234, 235 f . 
 Signorelli, Luca, 80 
 Spenser, 159, 235, 237 
 Strozzi, Marietta, 132 
 Surrey, the Earl of, 232 
 Sylvius, jEneas, 166 
 
 Tasso, Bernardo, 161 
 Tintoret, 149. 150, 151 
 Titian, 149, 151, 152 
 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, 62 
 Tottell's Miscellany, 232 
 Tuileries, Palace of the, 215 
 
 Uccello, Paolo, 30 
 
 Valla, Lorenzo, 11, 22, 43 
 Vandervelde, 238 
 Vatican Library, 96 
 Venice, 145 f. 
 Veronese, 149, 150 
 Verrocchio, Andrea, 81, 150 
 Vespasiano, 40, 51 
 Villon, Francois, 13, 221 
 Vinci, Leonardo da, 79, 82 f. 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 156 
 Warham, Archbishop, 182 
 Weyden, Roger van der, 172 
 Women of the Renaissance, 129 
 Wyat, Sir Tlxomas, 232 
 
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 51. Master Mariners. 
 
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 77. Co-Partnership and Profit Sharing. 
 
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 75. Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle. 
 
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 80. Common-Sense in Law. 
 
 By Prof. Paul Vinogradoff, D. C. L., LL. D. Social and Legal 
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