IV
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI[1]
This present age of literary dilettanteism, of elegant scribbling, has chosen to represent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the most glorious epoch of the Italian people, as the Renaissance of all grandeur and all beauty. We men and women of today admire civilization through guide-books and picture-postcards; powerless to create new monuments, we boast that we love the monuments of old; incapable of heroic action, we sit by the fire and read of the heroes of Homer and Villani. We prefer the polished elegance of church or palace to the bristling stone of the fortress—and we exalt the Quattrocento. Our own literary epoch has magnified a former literary epoch; and the legend of the "Dark Ages" still endures.
The fifteenth century was a time of rebirth, but it was a time of death as well; and we have failed to ask whether the renewal of certain elements of life brought full compensation for the loss of the elements that disappeared. The very
- ↑ Written in 1904, for the fifth centenary of Alberti's birth.
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