during its earlier period is necessary, because only
when that movement had reached a certain point did painting come to be
its most natural medium of expression.

=III. The Renaissance.=--The thousand years that elapsed between the
triumph of Christianity and the middle of the fourteenth century have
been not inaptly compared to the first fifteen or sixteen years in the
life of the individual. Whether full of sorrows or joys, of storms or
peace, these early years are chiefly characterised by tutelage and
unconsciousness of personality. But toward the end of the fourteenth
century something happened in Europe that happens in the lives of all
gifted individuals. There was an awakening to the sense of personality.
Although it was felt to a greater or less degree everywhere, Italy felt
the awakening earlier than the rest of Europe, and felt it far more
strongly. Its first manifestation was a boundless and insatiable
curiosity, urging people to find out all they could about the world and
about man. They turned eagerly to the study of classic literature and
ancient monuments, because these gave the key to what seemed an immense
store-house of forgotten knowledge; they were in fact led to antiquity
by the same impulse which, a little later, brought about the invention
of the printing-press and the discovery of America.

The first consequence of a return to classical literature was the
worship of human greatness. Roman literature, which the Italians
naturally mastered much earlier than Greek, dealt chiefly with politics
and war, seeming to give an altogether disproportionate place to the
individual, because it treated only of such individuals as were
concerned in great events. It is but a step from realising the greatness
of an event to believing that the persons concerned in it were equally
great, and this belief, fostered by the somewhat rhetorical literature
of Rome, met the new consciousness of personality more than half way,
and led to that unlimited admiration for human genius and achievement
which was so prominent a feature of the early Renaissance. The two
tendencies reacted upon each other. Roman literature stimulated the
admiration for genius, and this admiration in turn reinforced the
interest in that period of the world's history when genius was supposed
to be the rule rather than the exception; that is to say, it reinforced
the interest in antiquity.

The spirit of discovery, the never satisfied curiosity of