Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 4

need with the
former. The Italians of the Renaissance, under the sway of the fine arts,
sought after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. Therefore we
condemn their moral disquisitions and their criticisms as the flimsy

playthings of intellectual voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing
justice to these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products of an
all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose most serious
enthusiasms were aesthetic.
The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their social habits, their ideal of
manners, their standard of morality, the estimate they formed of men,
were alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age of splendid
ceremonies and magnificent parade, when the furniture of houses, the
armour of soldiers, the dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the
pageantry of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. On the
meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and
chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of
artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less
skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the
Pope upon S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house,
every Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen,
without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied.
During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be
endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for
producing it in every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at
the present day, when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done
their worst to denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the
incomparable and countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet.
Pacing the picture galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of
English nobles, and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still
forced upon us: how could Italy have done what she achieved within so
short a space of time? What must the houses and the churches once
have been, from which these spoils were taken, but which still remain
so rich in masterpieces? Psychologically to explain this universal
capacity for the fine arts in the nation at this epoch, is perhaps
impossible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would comprehend the
Italians of the Renaissance must study their art, and cling fast to that
Ariadne-thread throughout the labyrinthine windings of national
character. He must learn to recognise that herein lay the sources of their
intellectual strength as well as the secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the
different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the
aesthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance.
Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for
the limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal
with Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from
the achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and
architecture more superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the
Italians among all the nations of the modern world stand
unapproachably alone, but it is also the one that best enables us to
gauge their genius at the time when they impressed their culture on the
rest of Europe. In the history of the Italian intellect painting takes the
same rank as that of sculpture in the Greek. Before beginning, however,
to trace the course of Italian art, it will be necessary to discuss some
preliminary questions, important for a right understanding of the
relations assumed by painting to the thoughts of the Renaissance, and
for explaining its superiority over the sister art of sculpture in that age.
This I feel the more bound to do because it is my object in this volume
to treat of art with special reference to the general culture of the nation.
What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine
arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things,
to give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class
of emotions unknown to the ancients.[2] The inheritance of the Middle
Ages had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing
this work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the
dignity and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century,
the riches of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to
aid in the interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The
problem was no longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came
into close contact, and contended for the empire of the newly liberated
intellect. During this struggle