the results of prolonged and almost exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of the Italians as a people, make themselves manifest.  Collections of antiquities and libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts, and the manners of society affected paganism.  At the same time a worldly Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the spirit of Christianity.  That art should prove itself sensitive to this phase of intellectual and social life was natural.  Religious subjects were now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan myths with new forms.  How far they succeeded has been already made the matter of inquiry.  The most serious condemnation of art in this third period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be sincere.  But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak.  What the Renaissance achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power of starting on a new career of progress.  The false direction given to the art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom.  But the life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the philosopher of history knows well that the sum total of accomplishment at any time must be diminished by an unavoidable discount.  The Renaissance, like a man of genius, had the defects of its qualities.

FOOTNOTES: 

[56] Sketches of the History of Christian Art, vol. ii. p. 102.

[57] Since I wrote the paragraph above, I have chanced to read Mr. Buskin’s eloquent tirade against the modern sceptical school of critics in his “Mornings in Florence,” The Vaulted Book, pp. 105, 106.  With the spirit of it I thoroughly agree; feeling that, in the absence of solid evidence to the contrary, I would always rather accept sixteenth-century Italian tradition with Vasari, than reject it with German or English speculators of to-day.  This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical.

[58] See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello.

[59] The data is extremely doubtful.  Were we to trust internal evidence—­the evidence of style and handling—­we should be inclined to name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano’s works.  It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from the centre to either side.  There is an engraving of this bas-relief in Ottley’s Italian School of Design.