APPENDICES

I.—­The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello

II.—­Michael Angelo’s Sonnets

III.—­Chronological Tables

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] To the original edition of this volume.

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS

Art in Italy and Greece—­The Leading Phase of Culture—­AEsthetic Type of Literature—­Painting the Supreme Italian Art—­Its Task in the Renaissance—­Christian and Classical Traditions—­Sculpture for the Ancients—­Painting for the Romance Nations—­Mediaeval Faith and Superstition—­The Promise of Painting—­How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas?—­Greek and Christian Religion—­Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem—­A more Emotional Art needed—­Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance—­Painting and Christian Story—­Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art—­Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to Art—­Compromises effected by the Church—­Fra Bartolommeo’s S. Sebastian—­Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy—­Recapitulation—­Art in the end Paganises—­Music—­The Future of Painting after the Renaissance.

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art.  Nothing notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art.  If the methods of science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a like controlling influence.  Not only was each department of the fine arts practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone would imply.  It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point of view.

We see this in their literature.  It is probable that none but artistic natures will ever render full justice to the poetry of the Renaissance.  Critics endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of outline and to harmony of form than the Italians, complain that their poetry lacks substantial qualities; nor is it except by long familiarity with the plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and Poliziano.  We then perceive that these poets were not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go beyond a certain circle of effects.  They subordinated their work