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4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
develop into Arts rather than of agriculture. England had, like Italy, her feudal
era, her religious enthusiasm and age of church-building; but it is only in later
times that she has possessed a national school of Art.
Among the cities of Italy, the Art vigour is shown in different degrees:
many cities had their own especial schools, but they had not all an equal
vitality. There were in Florence (which is after all the true cradle of the
Renaissance) peculiar elements so assimilated to those which influenced the rise
of Greek Art, that the story of the Florentine revival almost exactly reproduces
that of Athens.
The Greek had two points of interest: the man and his city. After he had
brought the body to perfection, his care was to find a fit home for that body—a
safe town where he would be secure from other tribes and from foreign dangers.
It must be a well-ruled city to render life secure amongst its co-inhabitants, a
beautiful one to make existence pleasant within its walls; it must have fine
temples to keep the protecting gods within it, and for these objects every Greek
would sacrifice much, for as a man loves his home so did a Greek love his city—
at once his cradle and his safeguard.
Now all this was repeated in the Italian republics of the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries. Bound, within the girdle of walls, by the ties of mutual pro-
tection against common enemies, a free and just government formed, and wealth
beginning to increase, the citizens liberally spent their gold in beautifying the
city. In Greece the adornments were of a style to suit a pagan worship; in
Italy they took a Christian form, and in this lies the whole difference between the
two eras: the greater perfection of form in the one, the deeper earnestness of
meaning in the other. The religion of the Greeks produced godlike statues ;
that of Italy, Madonnas and saints, whose imperfect human nature and intense
spiritual life struggle within them. The effect of the first is that of a song
of joy, for the blessings of health and beauty; that of the latter is a
hymn to suffering, as shown forth in emaciated saints, martyrs, and sor-
rowful virgins.
To pass from the germ of the Renaissance to its visible plant, we find that
architecture may fitly represent the stem of its growth; it is the parent of
sculpture,.and through that of nearly all the other Arts; therefore any history
of Art must begin with architecture. The fact may be sufficiently demonstrated
by a glance at the chronological table of the first and second eras.
In the first era it will be seen that every one of the nine great architects was
also a sculptor. In the second, that of the five architects two were also sculp-
tors; while of the eleven sculptors, not one, except Ghiberti, attempted
architecture, and he did not excel in it. In the later tables the two Arts are