displayed essential qualities of intellectual freedom, delight in life,
exultation over rediscovered earth and man. The note of Renaissance
work in Germany was still Gothic. This we feel in the
penetrative earnestness of Dilrer, in the homeliness of Hans Sachs,
in the grotesque humour of Eulenspiegel and the Narrenschzf,
the sombre pregnancy of the Faust legend, the almost stolid mastery
of Holbein. It lay not in the German genius to escape from the
preoccupations and the limitations of the middle ages, for this
reason mainly that what we call medieval was to a very large
extent Teutonic. But on the Spanish peninsula, in the masterpieces
of Velazquez, Cervantes, Camoens, Calderon, we emerge
into an atmosphere of art, definitely national, distinctly modern,
where solid natural forms stand before us realistically modelled,
with light and shadow on their rounded outlines, and where the
airiest creatures of the fancy take shape and weave a dance of
rhythmic, light, incomparable intricacy. The Spanish Renaissance
would in itself suffice, if other witnesses were wanting, to prove
how inaccurate is the theory that limits this movement to the
revival of learning. Touched by Italian influences, enriched and
fortified by the new learning, Spanish genius walked firmly forward on
its own path. It was only crushed by forces generated in the nation
that produced it, by the Inquisition and by despotic Catholic
absolutism.
In the history of the Renaissance, Spain and Portugal represent
the exploration of the ocean and the colonization of the other
hemisphere. The voyages of Columbus and Vespucci
to America, the rounding of the, Cape by Diaz and the
discovery of the sea road to India by Vasco da Gama,Exploration
of the ocean.
Cortes’s conquest of Mexico and Pizarro’s conquest of
Peru, marked a new era for the human race and inaugurated
the modern age more decisively than any other series of events
has done. It has recently been maintained that modern European
history is chiefly an affair of competition between confederated
states for the possession of lands revealed by Columbus and Da
Gama. Without challenging or adopting this speculation, it may
be safely affirmed that nothing so pregnant of results has happened
as this exploration of the globe. To say that it displaced the centre
of gravity in politics and commerce, substituting the ocean for the
Mediterranean, dethroning Italy from her seat of central importance
in traffic, depressing the eastern and elevating the western powers
of Europe, opening a path for Anglo-Saxon expansiveness, forcing
philosophers and statesmen to regard the Occidental nations as a
single group in counterpoise to other groups of nations, the European
community as one unit correlated to other units of humanity upon
this planet, is truth enough to vindicate the vast significance of
these discoveries. The Renaissance, far from being the re-birth
of antiquity with its civilization confined to the Mediterranean,
with its Hercules’ Pillars beyond which lay Cimmerian darkness,
was thus effectively the entrance upon a quite incalculably wider
stage of life, on which mankind at large has since enacted one great
drama.
While Spanish navies were exploring the ocean, and Spanish paladins were overturning empires, Charles V. headed the reaction of Catholicism against reform. Stronger as king of Spain than as emperor, for the Empire was little but a name, he lent the weight of his authority to that system ofDogmatic Catholicism. coercion and repression which enslaved Italy, desolated Germany with war, and drowned the Low Countries in blood. Philip II., with full approval of the Spanish nation, pursued the same policy in an even stricter spirit. He was powerfully assisted by two institutions, in which the national character of Spain expressed itself, the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus. Of the former it is not needful to speak here. But we have to observe that the last great phenomenon of the Spanish Renaissance was Ignatius Loyola, who organized the militia by means of which the church worked her Counter-Reformation. His motto, Perinde ac cadaver, expressed that recognition of absolutism which apacy and monarchy demanded for their consolidation (see Jesits and Loyola).
The logical order of an essay which attempts to show how Renaissance was correlated to Reformation and Counter-Reformation has necessitated the treatment of Italy, Germany and Spain in succession; for these three nations were the three main agents in the tripleFrance in the Renaissance period. process to be analysed. It was due to their specific qualities, and to the diverse circumstances of their external development, that the re-birth of Europe took this form of duplex action on the lines of intellectual and moral progress, followed by reaction against mental freedom. We have now to speak of France, which earliest absorbed the influence of the Italian revival, and of England, which received it latest. The Renaissance may be said to have begun in France with Charles VIII.’s expedition to Naples, and to have continued until the extinction of the house of Valois. Louis XII. and Francis I. spent a considerable portion of their reigns in the attempt to secure possession of the Italian provinces they claimed. Henry II.’s queen was Catherine of the Medicean family; and her children, Charles IX. and Henry III., were Italianated Frenchmen. Thus the connexion between France and Italy during the period 1494-1589 was continuous. The French passed to and fro across the Alps on military and peaceful expeditions. Italians came to France as courtiers, ambassadors, men of business, captains and artists. French society assumed a strong Italian colouring, nor were the manners of the court very different from those of an Italian city, except that externally they remained ruder and less polished. The relation between the crown and its great feudatories, the military bias of the aristocracy, and the marked distinction between classes which survived from the middle ages, rendered France in many vital points unlike Italy. Yet the annals of that age, and the anecdotes retailed by Brantéme, prove that the royalty and nobility of France had been largely Italianized.
It is said that Louis XII. brought Fra Giocondo of Verona back with him to France, and founded a school of architects. But we need' not have recourse to this legend for the explanation of such Italian influences as were already noticeable in the Renaissance buildings on the Loire. WithoutFrench architecture. determining the French style, Italian intercourse helped to stimulate its formation and development. There are students of the 15th century in France who resent this intrusion of the Italian Renaissance. But they forget that France was bound b inexorable laws of human evolution to obey the impulse which communicated itself to every form of art in Europe. In the school of Fontainebleau, under the patronage of Francis I., that Italian influence made itself distinctly felt; yet a true French manner had been already formed, which, when it was subsequently applied at Paris, preserved a marked national quality. The characteristic of the style developed by Bullant, De l’Orme and Lescot, in the royal or princely palaces of Chenonceaux, Chambord, Anet, Ecouen, Fontainebleau, the Louvre and elsewhere, is a blending of capricious fancy and inventive richness of decoration with purity of outline and a large sense of the beauty of extended masses. Beginning with the older castles of Touraine, and passing onward to the Tuileries, we trace the passage from the medieval fortress to the modern pleasure-house, and note how architecture obeyed the special demands of that new phenomenon of Renaissance civilization, the court. In the general distribution of parts these monumental buildings express the peculiar conditions which French society assumed under the influence of Francis I. and Diane de Poitiers. In details of execution and harmonic combinations they illustrate the precision, logic, lucidity and cheerful spirit of the national genius. Here, as in Lombardy, a feeling for serene beauty derived from study of the antique has not interrupted the evolution of a style indigenous to France and eminently characteristic of the French temperament.
During the reign of Francis I. several Italian painters of eminence visited France. Among these, Del Rosso, Primaticcio, Del Sarto and Da Vinci are the most famous. But their example was not productive of a really great school of French painting. It was left for the Poussins and Claude LorraineFrench painting and sculpture. in the next century, acting under mingled Italian and sw1pture Flemish influences, to embody the still active spirit of the classical revival. These three masters were the contemporaries of Corneille, and do not belong to the Renaissance period. Sculpture, on the contrary, in which art, as in architecture, the medieval French had been surpassed by no other people of Europe, was practised with originality and power in the reigns of Henry II. and Francis I. Ponzio and Cellini, who quitted Italy for France, found themselves out rivalled in their own sphere by Jean Goujon, Cousin and Pilon. The decorative sculpture of this epoch, whether combined with architecture or isolated in monumental statuary, ranks for grace and suavity with the best of Sansovino’s. At the same time it is unmistakably inspired by a sense of beauty different from the Italian—more piquant and pointed, less languorous, more mannered perhaps, but with less of empty rhythmical effect. All this while, the minor arts of enamelling, miniature, glass-painting, goldsmith’s work, jewellery, engraving, tapestry, wood-carving, potteigf, &c., were cultivated with a spontaneity and freedom which prove that France, in the middle point between Flanders and Italy, was able to use both influences without a sacrifice of native taste. It may indeed be said in general that what is true of France is likewise true of all countries which felt the artistic impulses of the Renaissance. Whether we regard Spain, the Netherlands, or German? at this epoch, we find a national impress stamped upon the pro ucts of the plastic and the decorative arts, notwithstanding the prevalence of certain forms derived from the antique and Italy. It was only at a later period that the formalism of pseudo-classic pedantry reduced natural and national originality to a dead unanimity.
