The Spiritual Note in the Renaissance
The Renaissance is accepted as the second great creative period of the world, and from it dates the chief origins of modern thought and art and social life. It has been spoken of as the emancipation of the modern world, as the rise of the consciousness of freedom in the reason of mankind, and it is perhaps even more full of things suggested than of things achieved. This awakening is not to be measured by any short space of time, and though the period preceding it is obscure, and the contrast between medieval darkness and the light of the Revival is one of the most dramatic in history, the effect is not so absolute as at first appears. Yet while the elements can be traced, striving dimly as the human mind emerged out of darkness, there is unmistakably a moment when light is triumphant, and in which all those tendencies, which had been gathering intensity, concentrate and constitute a vital force. A moment compared to which all the preceding indications were but as the ripening of the wood, which culminates at length in flower and fruit.
This time of fruition was signalized in two ways: by an outburst of intellectual activity, and by an outburst of artistic activity. The second was the inevitable outcome of the first, conceived and dictated by it, and the intellectual awakening was from a very early date formed and fostered consciously and enthusiastically upon lines bequeathed by the classic tradition. For in spite of all the misfortunes, which had befallen Italy, and the degeneration and destruction, which had been the inevitable result of the long dominion of barbarism, her old classic past was ineradicable. The Latin nature still had within it those attributes and inclinations which had long before drawn the Romans to appreciate and, as far as they were able, to assimilate the spirit of classic Greece. Society had been broken up, reduced to separate and impotent particles; the classic communities had been shattered into fragments; the few signs, which emerge from the darkness, constitute no more than a blind groping after a tradition, which had lost its significance. Nevertheless as isolation and stagnation at last began to yield to social consciousness, it became apparent that the old mature Latin element still formed the basis of population, and in every aspect of its revival the country went back to classic forms.
The desire for learning was from the first directed by this Latin bias. Already in Dante the ripeness of a race that has never been barbarian is to be recognized, and long before the fall of Constantinople poured a flood of professors into Europe, the study of the classics had reached a kind of maturity. At first, indeed, the Latin authors were read from a feeling of reverence, and as affording illustrations and allegories for mediaeval modes of thought, rather than with any idea of assimilating the culture of the past, or of throwing light on present conditions. It is with Petrarch that the idea first takes shape, that within the literature of ancient Rome was to be found the secret which would re-create the Golden Age, which would lead his own world back to the arts, refinements, and graces of life. After having rescued every scrap of Latin literature, which still survived, he discovered that behind that influence lays another, still more potent, in the inspiration of the Greeks. A mind afire with a passionate attraction to the Old World, soon divined the forces that lay hid in Greek form and Hellenic literature, and at his suggestion Boccaccio set himself to do for the Greeks what his master had done for the Latins.
Largely by the efforts of these two great men of letters was it established (as Sir R. C. Yelf says) that " there had been a time when men had used all their faculties and minds without fear or reproof… freely seeking for knowledge in every field of speculation, and for beauty in all the realms of fancy… The pagan view was once more proclaimed, that man was made not only to toil and suffer, but also to enjoy." It was thus that Humanism first appeared, bringing a claim for the mental freedom of man, and for the full development of his being. Both Italy and Greece were ransacked for classical manuscripts. Hundreds of works were discovered, sometimes in the most obscure hiding places, long forgotten in remote monasteries, and by the middle of the fifteenth century almost the full range of classical literature was open to investigation. Enthusiasm was at first indiscriminate and undiscerning, but to Florence, which from the beginning took control of the movement, and in Florence especially to Cosimo de' Medici, was owing the establishment of professorships, the endowment of academies, and the introduction of eminent Greek savants, so that instruction was insured, and that critical faculty developed which secured form and coherency to the movement. The spirit of free inquiry; the determination to assimilate and incorporate all that was best in the civilization of the past; the creed that all learning is ultimately valuable as it bears upon life, were convictions with which the leaders of Renaissance thought set themselves to build up life afresh.
Looking back across a wide chasm of barren centuries, the men of the Florentine Revival beheld a system of civilization singularly complete, with an art, a philosophy, a form of government, a literature, even an ideal of conduct, all formed by and answering to the intellectual standard. Intellectualists themselves, they set the classic achievement before them as an attainable goal, or bent all their energies, all the newly aroused forces of the mind, to recapture that particular kind of wisdom, and that particular kind of beauty, which had been the attributes of the Greeks. They exalted the pagan plan of life, and were ready to follow it whither soever it led. "To the Florentine mind nothing is arduous," was a proverb of the time. Mental effort was welcomed rather than shirked. The happiness, which we recognize as belonging to the Renaissance, springs not so much from results achieved as from the sensation of the activity of the mind itself. The cast of Florentine thought was scientific and realistic, yet alone among Italian states Florence had captured not only the old studious spirit, but also the warm, living, human side of paganism. Enjoyment above all was the distinctive note, but it was no ordinary conception of enjoyment. Physical pleasure had its place, but it was leavened by a high ideal of the mind. Delight in learning; in art; in treasures of the ancient and modern world; in the gay and easy society of friends; in intercourse with the learned and cultured; in leisure, combined with a strong and conscious love of nature; a keen and thrilling zest for small as well as great pleasures; go to make up that wonderfully stimulating and intense existence which we recognize in the springtime of the Renaissance. It was in the person of Lorenzo de' Medici that we may almost say this spirit was incarnated. He is the type of his generation; the leading influence in this vital, pulsating city; the centre of a brilliant concourse, alive with discussion and wit and social fascination. " A being endowed with fire and radiance, and the power of drawing all men to him."
Nevertheless an exclusive demand for the rational, combined with deliberate adherence to the joy of life, must be naturally calculated to undermine the spiritual faculty in man and the religion it had nourished. Though the revival of learning was not at first anti-Christian, or certainly not anti-ecclesiastical (for two of the most famous Humanists of their day became Popes), yet it afforded a powerful incentive to men to break loose from the trammels which Christianity, as expressed in the Middle Ages, had thrown around thought and conduct. The more spiritual forms of religion could hardly go far among a people who refused to read the Bible for fear that its archaic Latin should injure their style.
The Academy of the Renaissance meant a concourse of select and sympathetic souls, who met together to give free play to the intellectual fancy and the critical faculty, and to probe into and play with the problems of life and philosophy suggested by the study of the ancient writers. The leaders of society, in short, were impressed with the belief that thought and intellect were confined to classic sources, and that Christian writings were to be associated with the barbaric centuries.
And in this faith the men of the Renaissance had no uncertain guide. Greek culture is remarkable for the very perfect intellectual ideal it holds up. Beauty, broad and clear, knowledge, joyousness, repose, and constancy had made up the Hellenic plan. The Greek was self-reliant, free with the freedom of understanding, making a deliberate selection from the elements of human life, calmly resigned to the inevitable, and distrusting every thought and assertion which could not give a clear account of itself. "Wealth of thought not wealth of learning" was the thing they coveted; it is the striking saying of Democritus. Handed down by letters to Rome, this became the note of classic culture. When we speak today of " the classic," it is not so much a special or particular knowledge we mean, as the capacity for seeing things in their relation to life. We imply that enlargement of the mind, that mental completeness which is capable of a wide survey, and we also imply the manner, which corresponds; the moderation, calmness, and lucidity, which are characteristic of the classic type. And just as Greek poetry, more than that of any other nation, is the expression of the people's collective life, so Greek learning draws its inspiration not so much from solitary study, as from noble companionship and ideal human intercourse. Learning was not to be enjoyed in seclusion. Greek culture was not estranged from the life of the community, but became a link with citizenship. We see in the Greek men of genius an extraordinary union of contrasted qualities, so that the scientific discoverer is also a poet, and the merchant is a profound physicist, or, like Pythagoras, a mystical theologian, an astronomer, a musician, and an original mathematician. "We see in them the conjunction of a rich, an inexhaustible imagination with a keen critical faculty, a restless, wondering, questioning spirit, fearless of consequences, bringing all things to the test of reason." A people observedly practical, yet sternly idealistic, endowed with such diverse and varied qualities as insured success in every field of human activity.
Such was the perfect scheme, perfect in the intellectual sense, which the men of the Renaissance aspired to make their own, and for a short time, at least in Florence, it seemed as if environment and personalities were combining to lead them to success, and if Florence had been more truly the centre of Italy, that success might have been deeper and more lasting. What then were the detrimental forces at work, and in what forms do we become aware of their presence?
The problems, which met mankind on the eve of the Renaissance, could not be solved after mere study of ancient art. A whole inner life had risen upon the ruins of classic life, created by Christianity, with its remorse, its humiliations, its sufferings, and had altered and multiplied the faculties, and thrust new sorrows and uncertainties upon the consciousness of the human mind. Under the seeming triumphs of Italian intellectualism, a spirit was at work by which the Greek philosophy had remained untroubled. A half-dead Christendom was awaiting an awakening. The twelfth century was a time when too many, totally enslaved by things temporal, were unduly covetous of honor and wealth, or merely spending their lives in pleasure. Power was in the hands of a few, who used it for little else than to oppress the poor. The infection of the common vices had even spread to those who, by their calling, ought to have given example to all.1 But ere the first springs stirred of the intellectual life, they were forestalled by that spiritual Renaissance with which it may be compared.
St. Francis stands for that very thing which classic culture, with all its noble attainment, did not contain; for that which the Renaissance itself disavowed and despised; for the strong spiritual note, which had been the dominant aim all through early medieval life. Medieval life had suffered because the spiritual faculty had not been sufficiently sustained by the light of reason. Classic life had suffered because the intellectual faculty had not been completed by the spiritual faculty. Both lives had, as it were, been lop sided. The Renaissance and the two master faculties of the human mind (which it should be the aim of all thought to reconcile) were pitted against one another.
St. Francis is in perfect sympathy with the great monastics of the Middle Ages. His own realization of spiritual peace and rapture echoes the note of St. Anselm and his contemporaries, so eloquent of the delight of the inward vision; so full of unearthly love for souls; so alive with a very melody of hope. The point of view of the Saint of Assisi is absolutely opposed to all those tendencies, which went to make up the Renaissance. To the delight in amassing rare and costly treasures of art, to making life exquisite, he opposed the freedom of utter poverty. To set against the joie de vivre of worldly circles, he brought the joy of the spirit, the "perfect blitheness" afforded by the shaking off of every trammel of the senses. Instead of the delight of reason and intellectual culture, he possessed the inward vision of those who live by faith. The joys of companionship belonged to him as much as they did to the circle of Lorenzo, but there were no bounds to that fellowship. The souls of all men were embraced by his affection, and beyond all that had ever yet been attempted, he had the vision of man's union with nature through its Creator. Instead of the scientific investigation of natural laws, the theories of Copernicus and Galileo, he is awake to every detail in the world of nature. His love and joy in it is something apart from learning. It has the sharp, keen note of spiritual affinity. The vision of a poet is his, He "hears the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat." "Our little sisters, the larks;" "our little brothers, the lambs;" "our brother, the wind;" "our sister, the water;" "our noble brother, the sun" were personalities in that life, half-childlike, half-angelic, and his extraordinary sympathy for all created things had a magnetic effect on all natures with which he came in contact.
The attitude and character of St. Francis of Assisi, the stretching forth of his whole being in self-forgetfulness, is the secret of his vast influence. Welded with a magnetic personality, it was a power, which never failed him. It accounts for the entire grasp, which he had on the minds and hearts of his associates. He reflected and evoked what was in the heart of the people, and they learned from him to live in the hope of immortality. The great men of the Renaissance loved success and genius and prosperity, but St. Francis was the idol of the poor and weak and wretched, whose lot he shared and understood, as with unfeigned joy he welcomed as his spouse the Poverty of the Lord Christ.
So with astonishing rapidity the Franciscan movement made its way, and in the course of a very few years a network of religious houses was established in the name and spirit of St. Francis all over central Italy. The foundation of the Tertiary Order, unlike anything that had ever been attempted before, drawing laymen within the magic circle, had an effect, which cannot be over-estimated in securing a hereditary adherence to his principles. For two hundred years St. Francis was the greatest power at work in the growing civilization of Europe, and though by the end of the fourteenth century the force and spring of the movement seemed to have spent its strength, the visible effects had given way to those influences less salient, but as tenacious, which in their subtle, silent fashion asserted the survival of demands which are never far away from the heart of man.
Such, in brief outline, seem to have been the two currents of thought, the one intellectual, the other spiritual, which acted upon the Renaissance. Of these the former is most on the surface and most in evidence, and has, therefore, monopolized the larger share of attention. Nevertheless, felt rather than seen, and often to be detected in its effects where not directly apparent, the spiritual influence constantly operates. Attracted by the militant exploits of the intellectual faculty, historians of that epoch are prone to concentrate upon it their attention and eloquence. But there is a kind of record more trustworthy than historical research, which suffers from no such exclusiveness. Art is an expression of life, which overlooks no factor that has contributed essential elements to that life which it records, and the art of the Renaissance throughout its course faithfully registers the action of the spiritual influences, which were at work in the heart of society. Such a testimony, however, is not of a kind that can be summarized in a sentence or two, and to that part of the subject I hope to return on a future occasion.
Endnotes
1 Encyclical letter of Leo XIII on centenary of St. Francis.
The Spiritual Note in the Renaissance -- Part II
An endeavor has been made in a previous essay1 on this subject to show how far the efforts of the men of the Renaissance to make the revival a purely intellectual one, on the lines of the masters of classic thought, were discounted by a great influence, unperceived by their preoccupied minds, and it was proposed to trace, through the medium of the art of those days, some signs by which this influence was manifested.
To say that art is the expression of life is to say that it is the outcome and the interpreter of its age. It is so intensely the product of its environment that the two cannot be separated. Probably the study of art on these lines conduces to a more profound and accurate knowledge of its time than comes to us in any other way. The historian reconstructing the story is biased by his own perception and temperament, and the facts read in one way by one man will produce an entirely different impression on another. But the surviving works of any age are their own witness. They are the impress which past generations have made of themselves, and from every period in which art was able to find adequate expression, we are able to extract the character and bias of the aims and thoughts of those among whom its creations arose.
We are not to stop short with classic buildings and statues. The same interpretative medium poured itself into the later civilization. Following down the current of human affairs, it takes charge of the Renaissance, investigating alike the intellectual bias which looked back to Athens, and the spiritual bias which looked back to Bethlehem, and to find both elements uneasily mingled all through Renaissance life and art.
At some future time it may be possible to analyze how fully the atmosphere of officialdom and arrested individuality are illustrated by the later Byzantine school. That was the stagnant pool across which the earliest breath of the coming revival blew like the freshening breeze of early dawn. It is with the advent of Giotto that it first gathers strength and volume. We have suggested St. Francis as the origin of that re-awakened spiritual tendency which was so opposed to the triumphant march of reason. It was inevitable that Giotto's transcendent talent should have been called upon to chronicle the events in the Saint's life; events which were so picturesque and so endeared to his followers as to supply artists through succeeding centuries with an inexhaustible wealth of subject matter, and yet the connection of Giotto and St. Francis is almost ironic, for all the frescoes from the hand of the great Florentine tell of a nature radically opposed to that of the Saint, and peculiarly devoid of the characteristics for which St. Francis stood.
If ever a man spoke the mind of his age and surroundings, Giotto spoke that of Florence and the Renaissance. The first typical Florentine painter, he vigorously shows the determination to see things as they really are. In his hands art puts on the intellectual guise, and adopts those methods of the reason, which already existed in full force in the life around him. The art of the fourteenth century was less an awakening than a ply or bias given it in the direction of the mind, and Giotto was before all else a man of intellect. In the painter and the subject that the inclination of society naturally allotted to him, we have the whole dual movement expressed. The contrast between St. Francis and the first great illustrator of his career is one, which has largely escaped notice, owing mainly to Ruskin treating of Giotto as if he were imbued with the same spirit, whereas we can see without the slightest doubt that he is a man of totally opposite nature. Rational, shrewd, practical, absorbent in creating great works, more engrossed in unravelling art problems than in expressing the spiritual idea, he reveals himself as a man of artistic aptitude, of intense vitality, but not as one of spiritual vision. He is grandly dramatic, but he is not pathetic or moving. He has little intuition of that temper of joyous romance, rather than of mortification and renunciation, in which St. Francis cast off all that was not essential to the union of the soul with its Savior.
The frescoes at Assisi witness unmistakably to this intellectual and rational spirit. Where "St. Francis renounces his heritage," Giotto grasps the unusual opportunity afforded for painting the nude, and makes a powerful muscular study for his Saint, giving a sense of solid form, but conveying little idea of one who has fought and agonized in a great spiritual conflict. The figures standing round, the father, the ecclesiastics, are finely composed and learnedly built, but they are cold and unconcerned in feeling, in spite of their appropriate gestures. In Santa Croce, the painter in a splendid scene before the Soldan presents heroic types in action, but his natural, his evident leaning is towards the monumental and dramatic; he is not possessed of the frenzy of faith. In the famous scene of the Saint's deathbed, the indifferent, pillarlike group of churchmen on either hand is introduced to set-off the undulating figures of the mourners, and excessive feeling is subordinated to the fascination of scientific composition. So, throughout, the stately rhythm and movement in the "Procession of the Virgin" (at Padua), the grandeur and simplicity of Mary as she leads the Blessed in the "Last Judgment," are Greek in their monumental quality, in the treatment of form and drapery. They show every gift save that poetic fervor, that atmosphere of spiritual evocation, upon which Florence, well on its way to the full Renaissance, no longer set great store.
And here, let us realize, was the key to the whole situation. If all other chronicles failed us, we could guess from Giotto's frescoes what were the demands society was making upon the men commissioned to express its ideals. The world in which Giotto lived, the patrons for whom he worked, no longer asked for religious thought. Not that the Renaissance lacked men still nominally in touch with traditional faith, and even men definitely religious, who like Cosimo de' Medici, in the next generation, were eager to reconcile Christian with Pagan teaching, but that the dominant tendency of society was more and more concerned to exalt the claims of man to mental freedom, and to break the fetters which had been imposed by medieval authority.
So those coming after Giotto, the scientific discoverers, the students of anatomy and perspective and other forms of research, broke away still more definitely from the dominion of religious feeling. The forms were retained but the spirit vanished. The Realists, the disciples of form (the quality of pure intellect), still carved and painted Madonnas and Crucifixions and Holy Conversations, but the subject was hardly more than a peg upon which to hang the result of anatomical studies, illustration of values, the fascinating formulae of perspective. To those who saw the studies of Pollajuolo, the experiments of Castagno and Domenico Veneziano, of Piero de' Franceschi, and Paolo Uccello, the intellectual aspect of art for a time must have seemed the logical outcome of the scientific culture in which their whole world was steeped. It was the voice and outward manifestation of what they were all thinking of, and caring for. Not in Florence shall we find an early art showing a high spiritual level, and testifying to the existence of that note of thought which in the end stole away the power of the Renaissance completely to assimilate classic tradition.
Among the towns, which stood apart from Florence, Siena is the most conspicuous. She lived an isolated life, antagonistic in its main lines to that of the city on the Arno. The Sienese were the most emotional, the most fiercely mystical of all the people of Italy, nurturing saints as freely as Florence produced humanists and men of science. In Siena the Renaissance took the form of a religious rather than a scientific movement, and instead of religion being subordinated to science, it remained the dominant interest. In that bare, mountainous country, among a fervent and idealistic race, the painters witness to the spirit that ran through it. With Duccio, they cling to the mysticism of the East, as handed down by the Byzantine School, and the sacred subjects are treated in a way that shows by what sympathies all their environment was permeated; a method deficient on the scientific side, but which keeps the old spiritual perfume.
A hundred years after Giotto, a Sienese painter, Stefano Sassetta, produced a series of frescoes dealing with the same incidents in the life of the beloved Saint that Giotto had painted on the walls of Assisi, and any of my readers who will take the trouble to compare photographs of the work of the two men, perhaps most readily accessible in Mr. Berenson's book, A Painter of the Franciscan Legend, will realize the strength of my argument. Sassetta is specially instanced, not because he was anything like so great a painter as Giotto, but because, like him, he was the head of a school, and bequeathed his characteristics to the whole group of Sienese painters, by whom he was followed. In Sassetta we find just those qualities, which Giotto lacked. He is sadly wanting in knowledge and science as Florence understood them, but his St. Francis, whether renouncing his worldly career, or giving his cloak to the beggar, or espousing Holy Poverty, really commends to us a type adequate and touching. Sassetta's aim is to realize the personality of that seraphic, romantic soul who exalted poverty and self-sacrifice into an idyllic incarnation, which had power to inspire rapture rather than resignation.
Mr. Berenson points out that in the "Marriage of St. Francis" in the Lower Church at Assisi, which if not painted by Giotto, was produced under his immediate influence, the artist has been engrossed in planning his figures into a fine decorative composition, in which the Saint, "a sleek young monk," has been created with no poignant emotion; but Sassetta, in his version of the same incident, gives the whole chivalrous reading of the Fioretti. And this is what the poet-painter, full still of the ardent love and reverence that lingers in his city, has made of it:
"In the foreground of a spacious plain, three maidens stand side by side… The one in brown is barefooted and most plainly clad, but it is on her hand that the ardent Saint, with an eager bend of his body, bestows his ring. Then swiftly they take flight, and as they disappear over the celestially pure horizon of Monte Aninata, they display symbols, which reveal them as Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. And when last we see them floating away in the pure ether, Lady Poverty looks back lovingly at Francis."
Spiritual imagination is at work here, and has taught the painter how to give that unearthly character to his undulating, unsubstantial figures, which is lacking in Giotto's massive and superbly realized types, and in the statuesque forms of Orcagna, while his faces have an aroma of unearthly ecstasy, telling of a keen realization of the life from within. Nature speaks to Sassetta as it perhaps never did to the Florentines. To him it means "the great cloister which his Lady Poverty brought down to her faithful knight;" his soaring skies uplift and dematerialize; the far pure horizons impress with the same emotion that he imparts to his keen and thrilling countenances, and assure us that the Sienese were not so much interested in scientific problems as inspired by that spiritual passion which always writes so legibly.
Nor did Siena stand alone, though perhaps she stood the highest. To all who love to wander in Italy, the name of Umbria brings a vision of wide spaces, of mountains stretching away, fold over fold, beneath the play of light and shadow. It is a country which in its spirituality and its joyousness seems a fit setting for that most human and lovable of Saints, who has left such deep traces upon its life. The broad and simple charm of Umbrian art is allied to a deep strain of mysticism. Among those quiet hills, war and rapine did their worst; the history of every little hill city is one of carnage and revenge; the annals of every famous house are deep-dyed in blood; yet through it all the people were adoring the memory of St. Francis, and listening fervently to the preaching of St. Bernardino.
The sentiment of the Umbrian School is less ecstatic and melancholy than that of the Sienese, but it is as far removed from the obvious science of the Florentines. It is cheerful and practical, as St. Francis was cheerful and practical, but the bias of a man's character is shown in what delights him, and as St. Francis derived light and joy not through the intellectual, but the spiritual faculty, so the inhabitants of these hill cities asked their painters for qualities of the heart rather than of the mind, for the gratification of that spiritual delight which the Renaissance tried to kill, but was not able.
Of all the qualities that set Umbria sharply apart from those who had but assimilated what reason could give, there is none that indirectly so contributes as that marvellous, that essentially spiritual quality of space which the painters seem to have drank in from the high skies and boundless expanses which surrounded them. We all feel the effect of wide, extended country, or of spacious, airy buildings: they arouse an emotion which carries us out of ourselves; they transport and exalt as those things do which build up the higher life, and those who excel in presenting them, if not necessarily mystical or spiritual themselves, are sufficiently penetrated by their environment to yield themselves to its inspiration.
Other evidences there are in Umbria that the old fervent medieval faith was still strong. Among them is banner-painting. The Gonfaloniere or banner was so important to these cities, that the municipalities made special grants to confraternities for its acquisition. These banners had no connection with triumphal processions, but were suppliant banners, borne against the awful visitations of the plague. They were followed by hosts of terror-stricken survivors, and were inspired by and received with that glowing faith in spiritual protection, which the humanists looked on as an amiable weakness. Many of these little cities still cherish the banner painted for their cathedral. The subject is the Madonna of Mercy or the Patron Saint, with the distressed suppliants cowering under their outspread mantle, and the tenderness of such pictures, with the centuries of association, which cling to them, makes an impression not easily effaced.
But what effect could this simple and almost primitive adherence to the old faith have upon that alertness, that eager and acute quality of Florentine life, the give and take of wit and thought, the play of mind which pervaded the city on the Arno? Intellectualism seemed to be enthroned there beyond all attack. The men who aspired to get all out of reason that reason could give, were whole-heartedly convinced that the old authorities were outworn and of no account, and yet all the time, with literature and art apparently emancipating themselves, with all that was most distinguished in mind devoted to the same end, another element was entering life.
The problem set before the Renaissance could not be solved by the mere study of classic perfection. The resources of the intellect were all inadequate. The Greeks had no experience of the whole inner life, the mental maladies created by Christianity. But the Florentine learning could not keep such elements at bay. Donatello is one of the first Florentine artists who perceives, that the very soul of man, with all its load of new struggles and uncertainties, must shine through the marble. The influence of paganism gives way to the sense of the pathetic in mankind, and the real, with all its imperfections, its human feeling and interest, becomes the object of the artist.
With Lorenzo de' Medici as the leader of thought, the fortress of the intellect seems at its most impregnable, yet in its very stronghold we are aware of a soul unsatisfied. Lorenzo's mysticism stands for the need of a dimly apprehended good. As art drew nearer to perfection it grew more dead. We may believe that the spiritual note, which is so strong in Botticelli, was not more characteristic of what the painter yearned to give, than of what the people asked. Limited that demand may have been, but it looks out on our generation through the eyes of his wistful Madonnas and fervid saints. Who can look at those wonderful countenances in the background of Leonardo's great, unfinished monochrome, "the Adoration of the Magi" (Uffizi), without knowing as surely as we can know anything that in the Florence of his day he had encountered a strain of thought which perhaps not everyone could hear? " The broken chords that marred the tune," that told of beings into whom, "the soil with all its maladies had been poured," yearning, asking, dying for the Light.
And at last, in Michelangelo, the man who in his art carried science to its height, who from the first was conversant with all the knowledge and learning of his day, the two strains are reconciled. Compare the Theseus of the Parthenon with the Adam of the Sistine Chapel. They are as far apart in spirit as they are alike in attitude and young, vigorous form. The one, throned upon Olympian heights, serene, impassible, incarnates the calm assurance of Greek life. The other, trembling, doubting, apprehensive, appeals to the omniscient Being Who kindles the electric spark of destiny. Well might Goethe say, "Phidias created serene gods; Michelangelo, suffering heroes." It is the note that runs through all his work; the mournful and piercing recognition of human weakness; the realization of the spirit that has mastered earthly ambition and sapped its power. The forms from his brush and chisel strengthen and uplift, preach a sterner purity, and sweep aside the mean and trivial, yet he suggests the helplessness and dependence of the soul in a way that would have been entirely alien to the classic mind.
Though from time to time, every faculty of the human mind has been exercised against Christianity, it has never ceased its struggle for expression. "The genius of Christianity," says Mr. Osborn Taylor,2 "has achieved full mastery over the arts of painting and sculpture. It has penetrated and transformed them, and can utter the sentiments and emotions of the Christian soul. Its types differ from the ancient Greek and Roman types, because they are the types of times and races into which Christianity has poured the many things which it embodies."
Today we have long been under the dominion of that ply of thought, which modern Europe took from Florence, and the intensity with which the mind is set on intellectual culture is working out to the inevitable result. It is the intellectual rather than the emotional qualities, which are most manifest in modern achievement, and both the merits and defects of its works, their cleverness and coldness, are intellectual merits and defects. Modern fiction bears witness to the same inspiration; it shows careful analysis, painstaking vivisection of characters and motives, but not the spontaneous vitality which arises from intuitive perception, and as surely as in any age, art being the expression of life, we expect to find, and we do succeed in finding, the same one-sided development. Men think and reason, but do they feel deeply?
But the end is not yet. We cannot permanently reassume those limitations. We cannot confine "thoughts that wander through eternity," or stem the tide of feeling by the most persistent devotion to the light of reason. Nor need we regret it. Classical life was a stranger to spiritual gloom and imperfection, but it was also a stranger to peace and rapture of a quality known only to later ages, and signs are not wanting that the human mind is even now feeling after that mystic consciousness, that philosophy of feeling, that spiritual note which alone assures a solution of life in which it may rest and be satisfied.
Endnotes
1 See The Catholic World, June 1913.
2 The Classic Heritage of the Middle Ages.
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