History of Renaissance

The term Renaissance (" New Birth"), is meant that new enthusiasm for classical literature,
learning, and art which sprang up in Italy towards the close of the Middle Ages, and which
during the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave a new culture to Europe.
The Crusades in their Relation to the Renaissance.-- Many agencies conspired to bring in the
Renaissance. Among these were the Crusades. These long-sustained enterprises . . . contributed
essentially to break the mental lethargy that had fallen upon the European mind, and to awaken
in the nations of Western Europe the spirit of a new life. Before the Crusades closed, the way of
the Renaissance was already prepared. In every territory of human activity the paths along which
advances were to be made by the men of coming generations had been marked out, and in many
directions trodden by the eager feet of the pioneers of the new life and culture.
The Development of Vernacular Literatures as an Expression of the New Spirit.--The
awakening of this new spirit in the Western nations is especially observable in the growth and
development of their vernacular literatures. It was, speaking broadly, during and just after the
crusading centuries that the native tongues of Europe found a voice,--began to form literatures of
their own. . . . As soon as their forms became somewhat settled, then literature was possible, and
all these speeches bud and blossom into song and romance. In Spain the epic poem of the Cid, a
reflection of Castilian chivalry, forms the beginning of Spanish literature; in the south of France
the Troubadours fill the land with the melody of their love songs; in the north
the Trouveurs recite the stirring romances of Charlemagne and his paladins, of King Arthur and
the Holy Grail; in Germany the harsh strains of the Nibelungenlied are followed by the softer
notes of the Minnesingers; in Italy Dante sings his Divine Comedy in the pure mellifluous
tongue of Tuscany, and creates a language for the Italian race; in England Chaucer writes his
Canterbury Tales and completes the fusion of Saxon and Norman into the English tongue.
This growth of native literatures foreshadowed the approaching Renaissance; for there was in
them a note of freedom, a note of protest against mediaeval asceticism and ecclesiastical
restraint. And at the same time that this literary development heralded the coming intellectual
revival it hastened its advance; for the light songs, tales, and romances of these vernacular
literatures, unlike the learned productions of the Schoolmen, which were in Latin and addressed
only to a limited class, appealed to the masses and thus stirred the universal mind and heart of
Europe.
Town Life and Lay Culture.--The spirit of the new life was nourished especially by the air of
the great cities. In speaking of mediaeval town life we noticed how within the towns there was
early developed a life like that of modern times. The atmosphere of these bustling, trafficking
cities called into existence a practical commercial spirit, a many-sided, independent, secular life
which in many respects was directly opposed to medieval teachings and ideals.

This intellectual and social movement within the mediaeval towns, especially in the great cityrepublics of Italy, was related most intimately, as we shall see in a moment, to that great revival
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to which the term Renaissance is distinctively applied.
Dante as a Forerunner of the Renaissance. --Dante Alighieri, "the fame of the Tuscan people,"
was born at Florence in 1265. He was exiled by the Florentines in I,302, and at the courts of
friends learned how hard a thing it is " to climb the stairway of a patron." He died at Ravenna in
1321, and his tomb there is a place of pilgrimage to-day.
It was during the years of his exile that Dante wrote his immortal poem, the Commedia as named
by himself, because of its happy ending; the Divina Commedia, or the " Divine Comedy," as
called by his admirers. This poem has been called the " Epic of Mediaevalism." It is an epitome
of the life and thought of the Middle Ages. Dante's theology is the theology of the mediaeval
Church; his philosophy is the philosophy of the Schoolmen; his science is the science of his time.
But although Dante viewed the world from a standpoint which was essentially that of the
mediaeval age which was passing away, still he was in a profound sense a prophet of the new age
which was approaching,--a forerunner of the Renaissance. He was such in his feeling for
classical antiquity. When he speaks lovingly of Vergil as his teacher and master, the one from
whom he took the beautiful style that had done him honor, he reveals how he has come to look
with other than mediaeval eyes upon the Augustan poet. His modern attitude towards GraecoRoman culture is further shown in his free use of the works of the classical writers; the
illustrative material of his great poem is drawn almost as largely from classical as from Hebrew
and Christian sources. Again, in his self-reliant judgment, in his critical spirit, in his mental
independence, Dante exhibits intellectual traits which we recognize as belonging rather to the
modern than to the medieval man.
The Fresh Stimulus from the Side of Classical Antiquity. --We have now reached the opening
of the fourteenth century. Just at this time the intellectual progress of Europe received a
tremendous impulse from the more perfect recovery of the inestimable treasures of the
civilization of Graeco-Roman antiquity. So far-reaching and transforming was the influence of
the old world of culture upon the nations of Western Europe that the Renaissance, viewed as the
transition from the mediaeval to the modern age, may properly be regarded as beginning with its
discovery, or rediscovery, and the appropriation of its riches by the Italian scholars. In the
following sections we shall try to give some account of this Renaissance movement in its earlier
stages and as it manifested itself in Italy.
THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
Inciting Causes of the Movement.--Just as the Reformation went forth from Germany and the
Political Revolution from France, so did the Renaissance go forth from Italy. And this was not an
accident. The Renaissance had its real beginnings in Italy for the reason that all those agencies

which were slowly transforming the mediaeval into the modern world were here more active and
effective in their workings than elsewhere.
Foremost among these agencies must be placed the influence of the Italian cities. We have
already seen how city life was more perfectly developed in Italy than in the other countries of
Western Europe. In the air of the great Italian city-republics there was nourished a Strong, selfreliant, secular, myriad-sided life. It was a political, intellectual, and artistic life like that of the
cities of ancient Greece. Florence, for example, became a second Athens, and in the eager air of
that city individual talent and faculty were developed as of old in the atmosphere of the Attic
capital. " In Florence," says Symonds, " had been produced such glorious human beings as the
world has rarely seen. The whole population formed an aristocracy of genius."
In a word, life in Italy earlier than elsewhere lost its mediaeval characteristics and assumed those
of the modern type. We may truly say that the Renaissance was cradled in the cities of mediaeval
Italy. The Italians, to use again the words of Symonds, were " the firstborn among the sons of
modern Europe."
A second circumstance that doubtless contributed to make Italy the birthplace of the Renaissance
was the fact that in Italy the break between the old and the new civilization was not so complete
as it was in the other countries of Western Europe. The Italians were closer in language and in
blood to the old Romans than were the other new-forming nations. They regarded themselves as
the direct descendants and heirs of the old conquerors of the world. This consciousness of
kinship with the men of a great past exerted an immense influence upon the imagination of the
Italians and tended not only to preserve the continuity of the historical development in the
peninsula but also to set as the first task of the Italian scholars the recovery and appropriation of
the culture of antiquity.
But more potent than all other agencies, not so much in awakening the Italian intellect as in
determining the direction of its activities after they were Once aroused by other inciting causes,
was the existence in the peninsula of so many monuments of the civilization and the grandeur of
ancient Rome. The cities themselves were, in a very exact sense, fragments of the old Empire;
and everywhere in the peninsula the ground was covered with 1 thins of the old Roman builders.
The influence which these reminders of a glorious past exerted upon sensitive souls is well
illustrated by the biographies of such men as Rienzi and Petrarch.
The Two Phases of the Italian Renaissance.--It was, as we have already intimated, the nearness
of the Italians to the classical past that caused the Renaissance in Italy to assume essentially the
character of a classical revival,--a recovery and appropriation by the Italians of the longneglected heritage of Graeco-Roman civilization.
The movement here consisted of two distinct yet closely related phases, namely, the revival of
classical literature and learning, and the revival of classical art. It is with the first only, the
intellectual and literary phase of the movement, that we shall be chiefly concerned. This feature

of the movement is called distinctively "Humanism," and the promoters of it are known as
"Humanists," because of their interest in the study of the classics, the literae humaniores, or the
"more human letters," in opposition to the diviner letters, that is, theology, which made up the
old education.
Petrarch, the First of the Humanists. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). Petrarch is hest
known to most as the writer of Italian sonnets, btlt his significance for general history is due
almost wholly to his relation to the revival of classic learning in Italy, and consequently it is only
of this phase of his activity that we shall speak.]
" Not only in the history of Italian literature but in that of the civilized world, and not only in this
but in the history of the human mind . . . Petrarch's name shines as a star of the first magnitude."
[Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classichen Alterthums, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 22.]
It is in such words as these that one of the greatest historians of humanism speaks of Petrarch and
his place in the history of the intellectual progress of the race. It will be worth our while to try to
understand what Petrarch was in himself and what he did which justifies such an appraisement of
his significance for universal history. To understand Petrarch is to understand the Renaissance.
Petrarch was the first and greatest representative of the humanistic phase of the Italian
Renaissance. He was the first scholar of the mediaeval time who fully realized and appreciated
the supreme excellence and beauty of the classical literature and its value as a means of culture.
His enthusiasm f o r t h e ancient writers was a sort of worship. At great cost of time and labor he
made a collection of about two hundred manuscript volumes of the classics. Among his choicest
Latin treasures were some of Cicero's letters, which he had himself discovered in an old library
at Verona, and reverently copied with his own hand. He could not read Greek, yet he gathered
Greek as well as Latin manuscripts. He had sixteen works of Plato and a revered copy of Homer
sent him from Constantinople; and thus, as he himself expressed it, the first of poets and the first
of philosophers took up their abode with him.
This last sentiment reveals Petrarch's feeling for his books. The spirits of their authors seemed to
him to surround him in his quiet library, and he was never so happy as when holding converse
with these choice souls of the past. Often he wrote letters to the old worthies,--Homer, Cicero,
Vergil, Seneca, and the rest,--for Petrarch loved thus to record his thoughts, and spent much of
his time in the recreation of letter writing; for recreation, and life itself, letter writing was to him.
Petrarch's enthusiasm for the classical authors became contagious. Fathers reproached him for
enticing their sons from the study of the law to the reading of the classics and the writing of
Latin verses. But the movement started by Petrarch could not be checked. The impulse he
imparted to humanistic studies is still felt in the world of letters and learning.
Petrarch's Feeling for the Ruins of Rome.--Petrarch had for the material monuments of
classical antiquity a feeling akin to that which he had for its literary memorials. . . .All this

illustrates perfectly the difference between the mediaeval man and the man of the Renaissance.
During all the mediaeval centuries, until the dawn of the intellectual revival, the ruins of Rome
were merely a quarry. The monuments of the Caesars were torn down for building material, the
sculptured marbles were burned into lime for mortar.
Now, Petrarch was one of the first men of medieval times who had for the ruins of Rome the
modern feeling. " He tells us how often with Giovanni Colonna he ascended the mighty vaults of
the Baths of Diocletian, and there in the transparent air, amid the wide silence, with the broad
panorama stretching far around them, they spoke, not of business, or political affairs, but of the
history which the ruins beneath their feet suggested."
[Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance Italy, p. 177. Petrarch represents still other
phases and qualities of the modern spirit, upon which, however, it is impossible for us to dwell.
Regarding his feeling for nature in her grand and romantic aspects, we must nevertheless say a
single word. One of the most remarkable passages in his writings is his description of his ascent
of Mount Ventoux, near Avignon, for the sake of the view from the top. This was the beginning
of the mountain climbing of modern times,--a new thing in the world. There was very little of it
in antiquity, and during the Middle Ages apparently none at all. Even Dante always speaks of the
mountains with a shudder. Nothing distinguishes the modern from the mediaeval man more
sharply than this new feeling for nature in her wilder and grander moods.]
Boccaccio, the Disciple of Petrarch.--Petrarch called into existence a school of ardent young
humanists who looked up to him as their master, and who carried on with unbounded enthusiasm
the work of exploring the new spiritual hemisphere which he had discovered. Most distinguished
among these disciples was Boccaccio (1313-1375), whose wide fame rests chiefly on
his Decameron, a collection of tales written in Italian, but whose work as a humanist alone has
interest for us in the present connection.
Boccaccio did much to spread and to deepen the enthusiasm for antiquity that Petrarch had
awakened. He industriously collected and copied ancient manuscripts and thus greatly promoted
classical scholarship in Italy. Imitating Petrarch, he tried to learn Greek, but, like Petrarch, made
very little progress towards the mastery of the language because of the incompetence of his
teacher and also because of the utter lack of text-books, grammars, and dictionaries. He
persuaded his teacher, however, to make a Latin translation of the Naiad and the Odyssey, and
was thus instrumental in giving to the world the first modern translation of Homer. It was a
wretched version, yet it served to inspire in the Italian scholars an intense desire to know at first
hand Greek literature,--that literature from which the old Roman authors had admittedly drawn
their inspiration.
The Italians are taught Greek by Chrysoloras.--This desire of the Italian scholars was soon
gratified. Just at the close of the fourteenth century the Eastern Emperor sent an embassy to Italy
to beg aid against the Turks. The commission was headed by Manuel Chrysoloras, an eminent
Greek scholar. No sooner had he landed at Venice than the Florentines sent him a pressing

invitation to come to their city. He acceded to their request, was received by them with such
honor as they might have shown a celestial being, and was given a professor's chair in the
university (I 396). Young and old thronged his class room. Men past sixty "felt the blood leap in
their veins " at the thought of being able to learn Greek.
The appearance of Chrysoloras as a teacher at Florence marks the revival, after seven centuries
of neglect, of the study of the Greek language and literature in the schools of Western Europe.
This meant much. It meant the revival of civilization, the opening of the modern age; for of all
the agencies concerned in transforming the mediaeval into the modern world one of the most
potent certainly was Greek culture.
["If it be true [as has been asserted] that except the blind forces of nature nothing moves in this
world which is not Greek in its origin, we are justified ill regarding the point of contact between
the Greek teacher Chrysoloras and his Florentine pupils as one of the most momentous crises ire
the history of civilization."--Symonds.]
The Search for Old Manuscripts.--Having now spoken of the pioneers of Italian humanism in
the fourteenth century, we can, in our remaining space, touch only in a very general way upon
the most important phases of the humanistic movement in the following century.
The first concern of the Italian scholars was to rescue from threatened oblivion what yet
remained of the ancient classics. Just as the antiquarians of to-day dig over the mounds of
Assyria for relics of the ancient civilization of the East, so did the humanists ransack the libraries
of the monasteries and cathedrals and search through all the out-of-the-way places of Europe for
old manuscripts of the classic writers.
The precious manuscripts were often discovered in a shameful state of neglect and in advanced
stages of decay. Sometimes they were found covered with mold in damp cells or loaded with
dust in the attics of monasteries. Again they were discovered, as by Boccaccio in the manuscript
room of the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, mutilated in various ways, some, for
instance, with the borders of the parchment pared away, and others with whole leaves lacking.
[This mutilation was due chiefly to the scarcity of writing material, which led the medieval
copyists to erase the original text of old parchments that they might use them a second time. In
this way many works of classical authors were destroyed. Sometimes, however the earlier text
was so imperfectly obliterated that by means of chemical reagents it can be wholly or partially
restored. Such twice.-written manuscripts are called palimpests]
This late search of the humanists for the works of the ancient authors saved to the world many
precious manuscripts which, a little longer neglected, would have been forever lost.
Patrons of the New Learning; the Founding of Libraries. --This gathering and copying of the
ancient manuscripts was costly in time and labor. But there was many a Maecenas to encourage
and further the work. Merchant princes, despots, and popes became generous patrons of the

humanists. Prominent among these promoters of the New Learning, as it was called, were
Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici at Florence. It was largely due to their genuine and enlightened
interest in the great undertaking of recovering for culture the ancient classical literatures that
Florence became the foster home of the intellectual and literary revival.
Among the papal promoters of the movement Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) was one of the most
noted. He sent out explorers to all parts of the West to search for manuscripts, and kept busy at
Rome a multitude of copyists and translators. A little later Pope Julius II (1503-1513) and Pope
Leo X (1513-1521) made Rome a brilliant center of Renaissance art and learning.
Libraries were founded where the new treasures might be safely stored and made accessible to
scholars. In this movement some of the largest libraries of Italy had their beginnings. At Florence
the Medici established the fine existing Medicean Library. At Rome Pope Nicholas V enriched
the original papal collection of books by the addition, it is said, of fully five thousand
manuscripts, and thus became the real founder of the celebrated Vatican library of the present
day.
How the Fall of Constantinople aided the Revival.--The humanistic movement, especially in
so far as it concerned Greek letters and learning, was given a great impulse by the disasters
which in the fifteenth century befell the Eastern Empire. Constantinople, it will be recalled, was
captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. But for a half century before that event the threatening
advance of the barbarians had caused a great migration of Greek scholars to the West. So many
of the exiles sought an asylum in Italy that one could say: " Greece has not fallen; she has
migrated to Italy, which in ancient times bore the name of Magna Graecia."
These fugitives brought with them many valuable manuscripts of the ancient Greek classics still
unknown to Western scholars. The enthusiasm of the Italians for everything Greek led to the
appointment of many of the exiles as teachers and lecturers in their schools and universities.
Thus there was now a repetition of what took place at Rome in the days of the later republic;
Italy was conquered a second time by the genius of Greece.
Translation and Criticism of the Classics.--The recovery of the ancient classics, their
multiplication by copyists, and their preservation in libraries was only the first and lightest part
of the task which the Italian humanists set themselves. The most difficult and significant part of
their work lay in the comparison and correction of texts, the translation into Latin of the Greek
manuscripts, and the interpretation and criticism of the ancient literatures now recovered.
Among the Italian scholars who devoted themselves to this work a foremost place must be
assigned to Politian (1454-1494), a man of remarkable genius and learning. Almost all the noted
humanists in Europe of his own and the following generation seem to have caught their
inspiration in his lecture room. [Another name of great renown connected with these fifteenth
century labors of the Italian scholars is that of Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), a man of
extraordinary gifts of mind. The special task which Pico set for himself was the harmonizing of

Christianity and the New Learning, a task like that of those scholars of the present time who seek
to reconcile the Bible and modern science.]
The Invention of Printing.--During the latter part of the fifteenth century the work of the Italian
humanists was greatly furthered by the happy and timely invention of the art of printing from
movable letters, the most important discovery, in the estimation of Hallam, recorded in the
annals of mankind.
The making of impressions by means of engraved seals or blocks seems to be a device as old as
civilization. The Chinese have practiced this form of printing from an early time. The art appears
to have sprung up independently in Europe during the later mediaeval period. First, devices on
playing cards were formed by impressions from blocks; then manuscripts were stamped with
portraits and pictures. The next step was to cut into the same block a few lines of explanatory
text. In time the lines increased to pages, and during the first half of the fifteenth century many
entire books were produced by the block-printing method.
But printing from blocks was slow and costly. The art was revolutionized by John Gutenberg
(1400-1468), a native of Mainz in Germany, through the invention of the movable letters which
we call type. [Some Dutch writers claim for Coster of Haarlem the honor of the invention, but
there is nothing aside from unreliable tradition on which such a claim can rest.] The oldest book
known to have been printed from movable letters was a Latin copy of the Bible issued from the
press of Gutenberg and Faust at Mainz between the years 1454 and 1456. The art spread rapidly
and before the close of the fifteenth century presses were busy in every country of Europe--in the
city of Venice alone there were two hundred--multiplying books with a rapidity undreamed of by
the patient copyists of the cloister.
The Aldine Press at Venice.--But it is merely the introduction of the new art into Italy that
especially concerns us now. The little that our brief space will permit us to say on this subject
gathers about the name of Aldus Manutius (1450-1515), who established at Venice a celebrated
printing house, known as the Aldine Press, the story of which forms one of the earliest and most
interesting chapters in the history of the new art in its relation to humanism.
In the course of a few years Aldus had given to the appreciative scholars of Europe an almost
complete series of the Greek authors. Besides these Greek editions he issued both Latin and
Hebrew texts. Altogether he printed over a hundred works. In quality of paper and in clearness
and beauty of type his editions have never been surpassed.
The work of the Aldine Press at Venice, in connection of course with what was done by presses
of less note in other places, made complete the recovery of the classical literatures, and by
scattering broadcast throughout Europe the works of the ancient authors rendered it impossible
that any part of them should ever again become lost to the world.

Humanism crossed the Alps.--As early as the middle of the fifteenth century the German youths
had begun to cross the Alps in order to study Greek at the feet of the masters there. As the type
and representative of these young German humanists we may name Reuchlin, who in I 48 2
journeyed to Italy and presented himself there before a celebrated teacher of Greek. As a test of
his knowledge of the language he was given to translate a passage from Thucydides. The young
barbarian--for by this term the Italians of that time expressed their contempt for an inhabitant of
the rude North-- turned the lines so easily and masterfully that the examiner, who was a nativeborn Greek, cried out in astonishment, "Our exiled Greece has flown beyond the Alps."
In transalpine Europe the humanistic movement became blended with other tendencies. In Italy it
had been an almost exclusive devotion to Greek and Latin letters and learning; but in the North
there was added to this enthusiasm for classical culture an equal and indeed supreme interest in
Hebrew and Christian antiquity. Hence here the literary and intellectual revival became, in the
profoundest sense, the moving cause of the great religious revolution known as the Reformation,
and it is in connection with the beginnings of that movement that we shall find a place to speak
of the humanists of Germany and the other northern lands.
The Artistic Revival.--As we have already seen, the new feeling for classical antiquity
awakened among the Italians embraced not simply the literary and philosophical side of the
Graeco-Roman culture, but the artistic side as well. Respecting this latter phase of the Italian
Renaissance it will be impossible for us to speak in detail, nor is it necessary for us to do so,
since the chief significance of the Renaissance for universal history, as already noted, is to be
sought in the purely intellectual movement traced in the preceding pages of this chapter.
The artistic revival was in its essence a return of art to nature; for mediaeval art lacked freedom
and naturalness. The artist was hampered by ecclesiastical tradition and restraint; he was,
moreover, under the influence of the religious asceticism of the time. His models as a rule were
the stiff, angular, lifeless forms of Byzantine art, or the gaunt, pinched bodies of saints and
anchorites. In the decoration of the walls, pulpits, and altars of the churches he was not at liberty,
even if he had the impulse, to depart from the consecrated traditional types. [In the Greek Church
at the present time the artist in the portrayal of sacred subjects is not permitted to change the
traditional expression or attitude of his figures.]
Now, what the Renaissance did for art was to liberate it from these trammels and to breathe into
its dead forms the spirit of that new life which was everywhere awakening. This emancipation
movement took place largely under impulses which came from a study of the masterpieces of
ancient art. Thus did classical antiquity exercise the same influence in the emancipation and
revival of art as in the emancipation and revival of letters. [In the list of Italian sculptors the
following names are especially noteworthy: Ghiberti (1378-1455), whose genius is shown in his
celebrated bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence, of which Michael Angelo said that they
were worthy to be the gates of Paradise; Brunelleschi (1377-1444), Donatello (1386-1466), and
Michael Angelo (1475-1564).]

Why Painting was the Supreme Art of the Italian Renaissance.--[The views presented in this
paragraph are those of Symonds in his work on The Fine arts, which forms the third volume of
his Renaissance in Italy. ]--The characteristic art of the Italian Renaissance was painting, and for
the reason that it best expresses the ideas an d sentiments of Christianity. Th e art that would be
the handmaid of the Church needed to be able to represent faith and hope, ecstasy and
suffering,--none of which things can well be expressed by sculpture, which is essentially the art
of repose.
Sculpture was the chief art of the Greeks, because among them the aim of the artist was to
represent physical beauty or strength. But the problem of the Christian artist is to express
spiritual emotion or feeling through the medium of the body. This cannot be represented in cold,
colorless marble. Thus, as Symonds asks, "How could the Last Judgment be expressed in plastic
form ? " The chief events of Christ's life removed him beyond the reach of sculpture.
Therefore, because sculpture has so little power to express emotion, painting, which runs so
easily the entire gamut of feeling, became the chosen medium of expression of the Italian artist.
This art alone enabled him to portray the raptures of the saint, the sweet charm of the Madonna,
the intense passion of the Christ, the moving terrors of the Last Judgment.
The Four Masters; Mingling of Christian and Classical Subjects.--The four supreme masters
of Italian Renaissance painting were Leonardo da Vinci (1452-l519), [Leonardo da Vinci was, in
his many-sidedness and versatility, a true child of the Italian Renaissance; he was at once painter,
sculptor, architect, poet, musician, and scientist] whose masterpiece is his task Stepper, on the
wall of a convent at Milan; Raphael (1483-1520), the best beloved of artists, whose Madonnas
are counted among the world's treasures; Michael Angelo's (1475-1564), whose best paintings
are his wonderful frescoes, among them the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel at Rome; and
Titian (1477-1576), the Venetian master, celebrated for his portraits, which have preserved for us
in flesh and blood, so to speak, many of the most noteworthy personages of his time. [A longer
list of the most eminent Italian painters would include at least the following names: Cimabue
(about 1240-1302) and Giotto (1275-1337), precursors of the revival; Era Angelico (l387-1455);
Correggio (about 1494-l534), Tintoretto (1518-1594) and Veronese (about 153~1588),
representatives of the Renaissance proper.]
The earlier Italian painters drew their subjects chiefly from Christian sources. They literally
covered the walls of the churches, palaces, and civic buildings of Italy with pictorial
representations of all the ideas and imaginings of the medieval ages respecting death, the
judgment, heaven, and hell. As Symonds tersely expresses it, they did by means of pictures what
Dante had done by means of poetry.
The later artists, more under the influence of the classical revival, mingled freely pagan and
Christian subjects and motives, and thus became truer representatives than their predecessors of
the Renaissance movement, one important issue of which was to be the reconciliation and
blending of pagan and Christian culture.