in Italy stands alone. So great was its strength
that it could supply both inspiration and leaders to other countries,
and still remain preeminent.

It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that this great
classical revival in Italy came, this re-birth of a true sense of beauty
which is called the Renaissance. It was an age of wonders, of great
artistic creations, and was one of the great epochs of the world, one of
the turning points of human existence. It covered so large a field and
was so many-sided that only careful study can give a full realization of
the giants of intellect and power who made its greatness, and who left
behind them work that shows the very quintessence of genius.

Italy, stirring slightly in the fourteenth century, woke and rose to her
greatest heights in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The whole people
responded to the new joy of life, the love of learning, the expression
of beauty in all its forms. All notes were struck,--gay, graceful,
beautiful, grave, cruel, dignified, reverential, magnificent, but all
with an exuberance of life and power that gave to Italian art its great
place in human culture. The great names of the period speak for
themselves,--Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da
Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Machiavelli, Benvenuto Cellini, and a host of
others.

The inspiration of the Renaissance came largely from the later Greek
schools of art and literature, Alexandria and Rhodes and the colonies in
Sicily and Italy, rather than ancient Greece. It was also the influence
which came to ancient Rome at its most luxurious period. The importance
of the taking of Alexandria and Constantinople in 1453 must not be
underestimated, as it drove scholars from the great libraries of the
East carrying their manuscripts to the nobles and priests and merchant
princes of Italy who thus became enthusiastic patrons of learning and
art. This later type of Greek art lacked the austerity of the ancient
type, and to the models full of joy and beauty and suffering, the
Italians of the Renaissance added the touch of their own temperament and
made them theirs in the glowing, rich and astounding way which has never
been equaled and probably never will be. Perfection of line and beauty
was not sufficient, the soul with its capacity for joy and suffering,
"the soul with all its maladies" as Pater says, had become a factor. The
impression made upon Michelangelo by seeing the Laocooen disinterr