g more than a change from late manhood to
early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new
hobbies and occupations. The decline from the eleventh to the
seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from
the world of Aurelian to the world of Gregory the Great is catastrophic.
Since the Christian Renaissance, new ideas and knowledge
notwithstanding, the world has grown rotten with decency and order. It
takes more than the rediscovery of Greek texts and Graeco-Roman statues
to provoke the cataclysms and earthquakes with which it grew young.

The art of the High Renaissance was conditioned by the demands of its
patrons. There is nothing odd about that; it is a recognised stage in
the rake's progress. The patrons of the Renaissance wanted plenty of
beauty of the kind dear to the impressionable stock-jobber. Only, the
plutocrats of the sixteenth century had a delicacy and magnificence of
taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern
stock-jobbers intolerable to them. Renaissance millionaires could be
vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen. They were neither
illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society.
Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian's and of
Veronese's women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and
obvious willingness to be kissed. That beauty for which can be
substituted the word "desirableness," and that insignificant beauty
which is the beauty of gems, were in great demand. Imitation was wanted,
too; for if pictures are to please as suggestions and mementoes, the
objects that suggest and remind must be adequately portrayed. These
pictures had got to stimulate the emotions of life, first; aesthetic
emotion was a secondary matter. A Renaissance picture was meant to say
just those things that a patron would like to hear. That way lies the
end of art: however wicked it may be to try to shock the public, it is
not so wicked as trying to please it. But whatever the Italian painters
of the Renaissance had to say they said in the grand manner. Remember,
we are not Dutchmen. Therefore let all your figures suggest the
appropriate emotion by means of the appropriate gesture--the gesture
consecrated by the great tradition. Straining limbs, looks of love,
hate, envy, fear and horror, up-turned or downcast eyes, hands
outstretched or clasped in despair--by means of our marvellous
machinery, and still more marvel