development of the rapid and flowing craft of fresco in place of the laborious and piecemeal craft of mosaic (henceforth for several centuries almost lost) was a great aid to this movement. After a period of something like stagnation, the movement received a vigorous fresh impulse soon after 1400, at about which date in Italy (not till near a century later in northern Europe) the beginning of the Renaissance is usually fixed.
5. The Renaissance period, from about 1400 to about 1600. The passion for classic literature, stimulated by the influence of Greek scholars into Italy after the fall of Constantinople; the enthusiastic revival of classic forms of architecture by architects like Brunelleschi and Alberti; the achievements in sculpture and painting of masters like Donatello and Masaccio, based on a new and impassioned study of nature and the antique together; these are the outstanding and universally known symptoms of the Italian Renaissance in the second and third quarters of the 15th century. Promptly and contemptuously in Italy, much more gradually and incompletely in the north, Gothic principles of construction and decoration were cast aside for classical principles, as reformulated by eager spirits from a combined study of Roman remains and of the text of Vitruvius. To the ideal types of devout and prayer-worn, ascetic and spiritualized humanity (tempered in certain subjects with elements of the homely and the grotesque), which the spirit of the middle ages had dictated to the sculptor and the painter, succeeded ideals of physical power, beauty and grace rivalling the Hellenic. The personages of the Christian faith and story were brought into visible kindred with those of ancient paganism. In the hands of certain artists a fortunate blending of the two ideals yielded results of a poignant and unique charm, which for us, who are the heirs both of antiquity and the middle ages, is far from being yet exhausted. At the same time, the love alike of republics, great princes, churchmen, nobles and merchants for works of art gave employment to sculptors and painters on themes other than ecclesiastical. The taste for civic or personal commemoration, for portraiture, for illustrations of allegory, romance and classic fable, covered with pictures the walls of council halls, of public and private palaces, and of villas. The invention of the oil medium by the painters of Flanders, and its gradual adoption by the Venetians and other schools of Italy for all purposes except the external decorations of buildings, added enormously to the resources of the art in rivalry with nature, and to the splendour of its results as objects of pride and luxury. The glories of matured Italian art reacted, not always favourably, on the north. The great days of Flemish painting had been from about 1430 to 1500, before any appreciable influence of the Renaissance had touched the schools of Brussels, of Bruges or of Antwerp. By about 1520 the artists of those schools had begun, except in portraiture, to lose their native vigour and originality by contact with the alien south. Among the great artists of Germany in the first half of the 16th century the work of one or two, like Burgkmair and Holbein, shows Italian influence reconciled not unsuccessfully with native instinct; but Dürer, the greatest of them, remained in all essentials Gothic and German to the end. During the last half of the century, the Netherlands and Germany alike yielded little but work of mongrel Teutonized Italian or Italianized Teutonic type, until towards its close Rubens accomplished, in the fire of his prodigious temperament, a true fusion of Flemish and Venetian qualities, at the same time closing gloriously the Renaissance period properly so called, and handing on an example which irresistibly affected a great part of modern painting.
6. Modern period, from about 1600 to the present time. During this period architecture remained in all European countries, until the 19th century, more or less completely under the influence of the Italian Renaissance. The principles of the classical revival had during a century or more of transition been gradually absorbed, first by France, then by Germany, the Low Countries, and Spain, and last by England, each country modifying the style according to its degree of knowledge or ignorance, its needs, instincts and traditions. Sculpture, which in the hands of the great masters of the earlier and later Renaissance in Italy had almost equalled its ancient glories, nay, in those of Michelangelo had actually surpassed them in the qualities at least of superhuman energy and intellectual expression—sculpture lost the sense of its true limitations, and entered, with the work of Bernini and even earlier, into an extravagant or “baroque” period of relaxed and bulging line, of exaggerated and ostentatious virtuosity. In this it followed the lead given by Italian architecture, by Jesuit church architecture especially, at and after the height of the Catholic reaction. From the monumental and memorial purposes which sculpture principally serves, it remained still, except in purely iconic uses, attached to or dependent on architecture. Not so painting, which asserted its independence more and more. In Protestant countries the old ecclesiastical patronage of the art had quite died out; in those that remained Catholic it continued, and even received a new stimulus from the anti-Protestant reaction. The demand for religious art was supplied with abundance of traditional facility, of technical accomplishment and devotional display, but with a loss of the old sincerity and inspiration. Almost all painting, even for the most extensive and monumental phases of decoration in church or palace or civic hall, was on canvas stretched over or fitted into its allotted space in the architecture, and the art of fresco, even in Venice, its last stronghold, was for a time neglected or forgotten. Portable paintings for princely or private galleries and cabinets became the chief and most characteristic products of the art. The subjects of painting multiplied themselves. All manner of new aspects of life and nature were brought within the technical compass of the painter. Besides devotional and classical subjects and portraiture, daily life in all its phases, down to the homeliest and grossest, the life of the parlour and the tavern, of field and shore and sea, with landscape in all its varieties, took their place as material for the painter. The truths of indoor and outdoor atmosphere were translated on canvas for the first time. The Dutchmen from about 1620 to 1670 were the most active innovators and path-breakers of modern art along all these lines. The greatest of them, Rembrandt, dealt, as has been said, like a master and a magician with the problems of human individuality as revealed in a mysterious colour and shadow world of his own invention. At the same time a painter of no less power in Spain, Velazquez, viewing the world in the natural light of every day, showed for the first time how vitally and subtly paint could render the relief and mutual values of figures and objects in space, the essential truth of their visible relations and reactions in the enveloping atmosphere. The achievement of these two victorious innovators has only come to be fully understood in our own day. The simultaneous conquest of Claude le Lorrain, on the other hand, over the atmospheric glow of summer and sunset on the Roman Campagna and the adjacent hills and coasts, found acceptance instantly, less perhaps for its own sake than because of the classical associations of the scenery which he depicted. The vast widening of the field of the painter’s art and multiplication of its subjects, which thus took place at the dawn of the modern period, were gains attended by one drawback, the loss, namely, of the sense of high seriousness and universal appeal which belonged to the art while its themes had been those of religion and classic story almost exclusively.
During the three hundred or so years of the modern period, academical schools attempting, more or less unsuccessfully, to carry on the great Italian and classical traditions of the Renaissance have not ceased to exist side by side with those which have striven to express new Classical and romantic revivals. ways of seeing and feeling. Sometimes, as in France first under Louis XIV., and again for forty years from the beginning of the Revolution to the dawn of romanticism, such schools have succeeded in crushing out and discrediting all efforts in other directions. Between these two epochs, say from 1710 to 1780, French 18th-century ideals of social elegance and brilliant frivolity expressed themselves in forms of great accomplishment and vivacity both in poetry and sculpture, from the days of Watteau to those of Fragonard and Clodion.
