of scientific interests, how it will force upon the historical student and the social philosopher, the art critic and the literary and linguistic investigator the consciousness of the fundamental unity of their tasks, how it will tend to deepen, to widen and to vivify the conception of national civilization.
Since Burckhardt's “Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,” it has been a popular axiom that modern individualism had its origin in the era of the “rinascimento.” Unquestionably, there is a good deal of truth in this axiom. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages were an era of collectivism, while the modern world, beginning with Humanism and the Reformation, is dominated by subjective thought and feeling. That, however, Burckhardt's phrase of “the discovery of the individual” by the great Italians of the quatro-cento is misleading, that, in other words, the Middle Ages themselves contain the germs of modern individualism, is an insight gaining more and more ground among historical students. Our museum contains one of the most striking illustrations of the correctness of this view in the remarkable array of plastic figures from Naumburg Cathedral, belonging to the height of mediaeval German sculpture in the thirteenth century. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the art of the renaissance which surpasses these twelve portrait statues in fulness, distinctness and vigor of individual life. Every one of these figures is a type by itself, a fully rounded personality. The Canoness standing erect, but with slightly inclined head, thoughtfully gazing down upon a book which she supports with one hand while the other turns over its leaves; the two pairs of princely husband and wife, one of the men full of power and determination, the other of youthfully sanguine appearance, one of the women broadly smiling, the other, with a gesture full of reserved dignity, drawing her garment to her face; the young ecclesiastic, with his carefully arranged hair flowing from his tonsure, holding the missal in front of him; the various knights, one looking out from behind his shield, another leaning upon his sword, others in still different postures and moods—there is not a figure among them which did not represent a particular individual at a particular moment, and which did not, without losing itself in capricious imitation of accidental trifles, reproduce life as it is. It
