onsummation of Italian
intelligence in many departments--the arrival at maturity of the
Christian trained mind tempered by the philosophy of Greece, and the
knowledge of the actual world. Fully aroused at last, the Italian
intellect became inquisitive, inventive, scientific, skeptical--yes,
treacherous, immoral, polluted. It questioned all things, doubted
where it pleased, saturated itself with crime, corruption, and
sensuality, yet bowed at the shrine of the beautiful and knelt at the
altar of Christianity. It is an illustration of the contradictions
that may exist when the intellectual, the religious, and the moral
are brought together, with the intellectual in predominance.

[Illustration: FIG. 38.--FRA BARTOLOMMEO. DESCENT FROM CROSS. PITTI.]

And that keen Renaissance intellect made swift progress. It remodelled
the philosophy of Greece, and used its literature as a mould for its
own. It developed Roman law and introduced modern science. The world
without and the world within were rediscovered. Land and sea, starry
sky and planetary system, were fixed upon the chart. Man himself, the
animals, the planets, organic and inorganic life, the small things of
the earth gave up their secrets. Inventions utilized all classes of
products, commerce flourished, free cities were builded, universities
arose, learning spread itself on the pages of newly invented books of
print, and, perhaps, greatest of all, the arts arose on strong wings
of life to the very highest altitude.

For the moral side of the Renaissance intellect it had its tastes and
refinements, as shown in its high quality of art; but it also had its
polluting and degrading features, as shown in its political and social
life. Religion was visibly weakening though the ecclesiastical still
held strong. People were forgetting the faith of the early days, and
taking up with the material things about them. They were glorifying
the human and exalting the natural. The story of Greece was being
repeated in Italy. And out of this new worship came jewels of rarity
and beauty, but out of it also came faithlessness, corruption, vice.

Strictly speaking, the Renaissance had been accomplished before the
year 1500, but so great was its impetus that, in the arts at least, it
extended half-way through the sixteenth century. Then it began to fail
through exhaustion.

MOTIVES AND METHODS: The religious subject still held with the
painters, but this subject in High-Renaissance day