their wont, and the many interests of the
intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The
fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is
sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is
an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete.
Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world
has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There
is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike
communicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all the
various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance
with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age
produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of
its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the
studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth
century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm
for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake,
by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit,
he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the
last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive
and tendencies.

CONTENTS

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
LEONARDO DA VINCI
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
WINCKELMANN
CONCLUSION

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away from
Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was in
France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun;
and French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations of
Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisi
took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic
love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how
Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French
fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art
of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this
notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelf