the spirit of the sixteenth century was unfavourable to the highest ideals and the most exemplary practice, and, save for the works of a few exceptional men, there were no high achievements in painting after about 1520, except in Venice, where more than elsewhere natural and wholesome conditions had been maintained.
Among the many influences that were stirring the artistic minds of the Renaissance there were two of chief importance, the Neo-pagan revival, and the true intellectual life of the people which was independent of the retrospective movement, and had been growing up through the Middle Ages, The most sterling qualities of the artistic products of the period are due to this intellectual life, and Florentine and Venetian painting, the two most admirable phases of the supreme art of Italy, are the finest expression of this. In other words, it was not the revival of interest in ancient thought and feeling, nor the influence of classic models, so much as the ripened development of the native Italian genius itself, that produced what is most excellent in the Fine Arts of the Renaissance. A consciously retrospective motive can hardly be a vital force in artistic development, and the direct attempt, in so far as such attempt was made, to shape the arts after classic models was an unmixed evil. The native traditions and innate tendencies of the Italian people were enough of themselves to give a strong classic quality to their art. In architecture what of classic feeling was natural to them needed only in the fifteenth century to be freed from the elements which had been misappropriated from the mediæval art of the North to allow it true expression in forms adapted to their needs. In normal human progress each successive stage of development creates its own appropri-
Antoine, Paris, 1883, p. 32, remarks on this with admirable discrimination as follows: "Certes, sous le pinceau de Botticelli, de pareils sujets [subjects drawn from Classical Mythology] gardent un caractère d'élégance tendre et de mélancolie presque analogue à la physionomie des scènes où figurent l'Enfant-Dieu et la Mádone. II y a loin de cette manière d'interpréter la Fable aux panégyriques violemment ou galamment licencieux que les hôtes les plus mal famés de l'Olympe obtiendront dans les siècles suivants; il y a loin des gracieuses inventions de Botticelli aux lascivie brutales de Jules Romain et d'Augustin Carrache ou aux gamineries mythologiques de Boucher et de ses pareils, et l'on a quelque peine aujourd'hui, en face d'aussi chastes tableaux, a comprendre la vehéménce des reproches fulminés jadis par Savonarole."
