rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ever; our day
will come."

We have all seen them opposite to each other, these two arts, the art
born of antiquity and the art born of the Middle Ages; but whether this
meeting was friendly or hostile or merely indifferent, is a question of
constant dispute. To some, mediaeval art has appeared being led,
Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of Nature up to a
Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven;
others have seen mediaeval art, like some strong, chaste knight turning
away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of antiquity, and
pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the
antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the
Christian artist; the antique has been for others a glorious Helen, an
unattainable perfection, ever pursued by the mediaeval craftsman, but
seized by him only as a phantom. Magician or witch, voluptuous,
destroying Venus or cold and ungrasped Helen, what was the antique to
the art born of the Middle Ages and developed during the Renaissance?
Was the relation between them that of tuition, cool and abstract, or of
fruitful lore, or of deluding and damning example?

The art which came to maturity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries was generated in the early mediaeval revival. The seeds may,
indeed, have come down from antiquity, but they remained for nearly a
thousand years hidden in the withered, rotting remains of former
vegetation, and it was not till that vegetation had completely
decomposed and become part of the soil, it was not till putrefaction had
turned into germination, that artistic organism timidly reappeared. The
new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it.
Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artisans and merchants formed
into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into
cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine
mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture;
its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the
civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until,
when mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment of consolidation,
when the cathedrals of Lucca and Pisa stood completed, when Niccoto and
Giovanni Pisani had sculptured their pulpits and sepulchres, painting,
in the hands of, Cimabue