The Renaissance (14th To 16th Century) – 5

Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty.

Continuing Early Renaissance,
our selection from John Addington Symonds. The selection is presented in seven easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in Early Renaissance.

Time: 14th. To 16th. Century
Place: Italy

Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo’s prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian’s “Virgin Received into Heaven,” soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went further and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.

Through the instrumentality of art and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister. It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the prose of Boethius — and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints — together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Cicero and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship Litteræ Humaniores (“the more human literature”), the literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de’ Medici, who began the Medicean collection a little earlier and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period. It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism had not yet begun. The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho — absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long buried amphoræ of inspiration.

What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture. Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde alike became scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription “Julia, Daughter of Claudius,” and inside the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed — so goes the legend — to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description. She was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl’s hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.

Continued.

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