So, too, the Church. The Middle Ages left a heritage of two vast contending forces to the Renaissance. On the one hand the sweet bequest of Saint Francis of Assisi, beautiful and exquisite, gentle and tender, loving beast and flower and all created things, redolent of charity and mildness, generosity and love ; on the other Saint Dominic, the remorseless foe of all heresies, the warlike and aggressive lord of dogma, " the holy athlete, gentle to his own, and to his foes cruel " of Dante's phrase-he who dealt out butcheries and burnings to save the soul of man. For [35] St. Francis, love ; for St. Dominic, wrath-the old conflict of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels, the eternal problem. So the punning monks did call the Dominicans Domini canes-the black and white hounds hunting heretic wolves.

Again, it must be borne in mind that the Italians of the Renaissance expressed their genius, their hopes, their aims, their ambitions, their life, in terms of art-above all, in the art of painting. The Italian peoples, their habits, their manners, their everyday life, uttered themselves forth artistically. The land was ablaze with splendid ceremonial; magnificence paraded itself everywhere ; the heads of the great families kept vast armies of retainers arrayed in fine armour and gorgeous liveries, their houses sumptuously built and decorated, their furniture elaborate ; every article of domestic use aimed at the beautiful-cups, tankards, platters, door-handles, knockers, beds, coverlets, trunks, tables, everything. From the Pope upon St. Peter's chair to the clerk in the city, all played at the splendid pageant of life-each was picturesque. Wars were waged as a mighty pageant, with elaborate laws and formalities and etiquette-and marchings and countermarchings hither and thither, drums beating, banners flying, trumpets sounding.

[36]

CHAPTER II

THE RENAISSANCE DAWNS OVER CENTRAL ITALY

HE who would grasp the significance of the Renaissance of the arts in Italy would do well first to set the shape of Italy in the mirror of his mind. As schoolboys have it, Italy lies like a long jack-boot upon the waters of the Mediterranean. The Alps, sweeping round the northern boundaries of Italy, curve down southwards to separate France from her ; turn eastwards, skirting the edge of the Gulf of Genoa ; then strike southwards to make the backbone of Italy as the Apennines, no longer hugging the shore, but running towards the heel of Italy athwart the land, then having near touched the eastern coast at the boot's ankle, they change their intention, and run down to the toe of the boot. This backbone of Italy divides the northern lowlands of Lombardy and Venice from the Tuscan lowlands of western mid-Italy ; and to the cities of these two lowlands, north and south of the Apennines, came the wondrous blossoming and flowering of the arts of the Renaissance. Of a truth, this shaping of her surface not only influenced her arts, but largely affected her troublous and strenuous history, and shaped her destinies.

The history of Renaissance Italy is a very intricate affair, since it is the history of rival towns and rival families-not the history of a people. The art of the time has fallen into this complexity and become as a puzzle, largely due to the utterly false system of attributing to each town an art of its own. The art of Italy, as a matter of fact, is but the art of three great movements-the art of [37] Venice in the north, and the art of Central Italy, which had its two homes, the one in Florence and the other alongside in Siena, which spread to neighbouring Umbria, making its home in Perugia. All other Italian art arose out of these three great centres-Venice, Florence, and Umbria.

Sometimes the issue is confused by talk of " the school of Milan," but this was simply, as we shall see, the school of Florence, taken thither by Leonardo da Vinci. And so with the others.

Another source of confusion is the idea that the art of the Renaissance arose in Italy out of Greece ; that it flourished in Italy ; then passed to the north and west. It did no such thing. The Renaissance began along the Rhine at the same time as in Italy. The Flemish and Italian Renaissance acted and counteracted the one on the other, and both had their roots not in Hellas but in the Middle Ages ; both were essentially children of the Middle Ages, but both were affected in the schoolroom by the antique governess.

Unless this essential fact be grasped and held, no man shall understand the significance either of the Renaissance or of its artistic utterance.

What fairy godmother watched over Venice and Florence, over Siena and Perugia, who shall tell ? We can but shrug the shoulder of surprise that Genoa, despite her wide sea-intercourse with the world, and situate near Carrara's famed marble quarries-that Rome, the centre of the age and the shrine of the art-student and the traveller -that Piedmont and Liguria, Naples and the South, remained wholly barren of the creators of art. Whilst Venice sang the glory of the world and the splendour of life in oil-painting, Florence gave forth in fresco the tragic intensity of life, founded on the grim and stern spirit of the [38] prophets, felt with an almost Greek fatalism ; and pietistic Siena and Umbria, stirred by the gentle and gracious spirit of St. Francis from Assisi, hymned the religious fervour that comes from spiritual contemplation and the consolation of the Gospels.

TO TUSCANY, then, it were well first to turn. Painting began as the servant of the Church-her sole theme the thought of the mediæval church. The painters, employing nature to give visual form to their art, became masters of natural forms ; mere vague mystic dreams gave way to realism. The artist began early to find that there were far wider emotions than such as were aroused by worship ; he speedily became secular. The rapid increase of the power of the great families soon saw the artists adorning the palaces. The classical revival and interest in antique thought that began to grip the imagination of men about the middle fourteen-hundreds, still further increased the secular aim of the painter. As the fourteen-hundreds ran out, politics and social life, to the very inmost sanctuaries of the great Church itself, rapidly lost religious fervour and the simple mediæval faith ; the old sense of morality was loosened, and took on the more pagan ideals of the antique Greek ; and a humane paganism and State-Christianity went to their wedding. By the year 1500 the mightiest masters of the art of painting in the Renaissance wrought a splendid art, that proved the age to be neither wholly Christian nor wholly heathen, but learned and intensely human. Yet even as she uttered her supreme song, the end was near for Italy. She flung away her liberty in the false glamour of the splendour of her great families, who, under the forms of liberty, reduced her to slavery and filched her strength.