. Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here. It went
further, and plunged into paganism. Sculptors and painters combined with
architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church
by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.

Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art
introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world
a real resurrection of the body which, since the destruction of the
pagan civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements
within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister. It was scholarship which
revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human
thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life
regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas. During the
Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Vergil and the
prose of Boethius--and Vergil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually
been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius,
Cicero, and Horace. The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public
the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the
Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental
learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic
traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were
for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.
With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous
subject-matter of scholarship _Litterae Humaniores_ ("the more human
literature"), the literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the
Renaissance. The first is the age of passionate desire. Petrarch poring
over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity
learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of
poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the
Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of
acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican
Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and
convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek,
who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from
Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the
heroes