ke, held the same hopes and fears, and
shared, to a surprising extent, the pains and pleasures of a simple and
rather cruel society. The Renaissance changed all that. The lord entered
the new world of ideas and refined sensuality; the peasant stayed where
he was, or, as the last vestiges of spiritual religion began to
disappear with the commons, sank lower. Popular art changed so gradually
that in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century we still find,
in remote corners, things that are rude but profoundly moving. Village
masons could still create in stone at the time when Jacques Coeur was
building himself the first "residence worthy of a millionaire" that had
been "erected" since the days of Honorius. But that popular art pursued
the downhill road sedately while plutocratic art went with a run is a
curious accident of which the traces are soon lost; the outstanding fact
is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the
spiritual view of life. With that renunciation the power of creating
significant form becomes the inexplicable gift of the occasional
genius. Here and there an individual produces a work of art, so art
comes to be regarded as something essentially sporadic and peculiar. The
artist is reckoned a freak. We are in the age of names and catalogues
and genius-worship. Now, genius-worship is the infallible sign of an
uncreative age. In great ages, though we may not all be geniuses, many
of us are artists, and where there are many artists art tends to become
anonymous.

The Classical Renaissance was something different in kind from what I
have called the Christian Renaissance. It must be placed somewhere
between 1350 and 1600. Place it where you will. For my part I always
think of it as the gorgeous and well-cut garment of the years that fall
between 1453 and 1594, between the capture of Constantinople and the
death of Tintoretto. To me, it is the age of Lionardo, of Charles VIII
and Francis I, of Cesare Borgia and Leo X, of Raffael, of Machiavelli,
and of Erasmus, who carries us on to the second stage, the period of
angry ecclesiastical politics, of Clement VII, Fontainebleau, Rabelais,
Titian, Palladio, and Vasari. But, on any computation, in the years that
lie between the spiritual exaltation of the early twelfth century and
the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical
Renaissance. Whatever happened, happened between those dates. And all
that did happen was nothin