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AN



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INTEODUCTION TO THE STUDY



OF THE



RENAISSANCE



BY



UNIVERSITY LIBRARY



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CAUTION — Please handle this volume with care.
The paper is very brittle.



[All rights reserved]



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C5
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INTKODUCTION TO THE STUDY



OF THE



RENAISSANCE



BY

}',-.. LILIAN F. FIELD



LONDON

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1898

[All rights reserved]

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I



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vi THE RENAISSANCE

enrich my own sheaf — I can only plead in excuse that
it is my desire to entice the student to glean from
the same fields a more abundant harvest for himself.
It would make too long a list to enumerate all the
authorities that have necessarily been consulted for a
general survey of this kind. In the sections which deal
with Italian culture I have been almost entirely guided
by the late Mr. J. A. Symonds' monumental work, * The
Renaissance in Italy/ and others of his writings ; and I
must also express my obligations to the works of Mr.
Pater ; M. Taine ; Michelet ( ' Histoire de France ' and
Life of Luther ' ) ; Milman ( ' History of Latin Chris-
tianity ' ) ; Vernon Lee ( * Euphorion ' ) ; Mr. Beard ( * The
Reformation in Relation to Modern Thought ' ) ; Mrs.
Mark Pattison (*The Renaissance of Art in France');
Mr. Lecky ( * Rationalism in Europe/ etc.) ; Mr. Ruskin
(various works) ; Mr. Bryce ( * The Holy Roman Empire ' ) ;
Mrs. Oliphant ( ' Cervantes/ etc.) ; Professor Saintsbury
( * History of French Literature ' and * Elizabethan Litera-
ture ' ) ; Mr. Wakeman ( * History of the English
Church ' ) ; Mr. T. R. Smith ( * Architecture : Renais-
sance and Modem'); Ticknor (* History of Spanish
Literature ' ), as well as Hallam, Froude, Green, Motley,
Hazlitt, Ranke, Sismondi, Freeman, and many others
whose names will readily suggest themselves as authorities.

L. F. F.

November 1898



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CONTENTS



CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Middle Ages 1

II. The Reaction 22

III. The Revival of Learning 38

IV. The Renaissance in Literature

Section 1. In Italy 68

„ 2. In France .85

„ ' 3. In England 100

„ 4. In SjpoMi 125

„ 5. In Germany 140

V. The Rise of the Drama 141

VI. The Renaissance in Architecture . . . .178
VII. The Renaissance in Sculpture ..... 195
VIII. The Renaissance in Painting

Section 1. In Italy - . . 215

2. In Spain 239

3. In France •. . 245

4. In Flanders • 250

5. In Holland 256

6. In Germany 258

IX. The Renaissance and Religious Thought . . . 267

Index 297



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AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE

STUDY OF THE RENAISSANCE



CHAPTER I
THE MIDDLE AGES

The progress of the world is, it has been said, a pro-
gress by reaction. It has never been a steady advance
towards higher and higher development, but, rather, a some-
what jerky progression — marked now by long intervals of
apparent torpor, now by ebullitions of feverish activity.
There have been times when men have grown weary of
the existing conditions of life, and have risen in revolt
against them ; either, in the result, falling a step in the
scale of civilisation, or else initiating a new era of progress.
And the t^ransition from the mediaeval to the modern
world — more or less aptly designated the Renaissance-^
was essentially a movement of reaction. We shall there-
fore appreciate its character the better if we first recall
the conditions which had become irksome enough to bring
about so widespread a revolt.



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2 THE KENAISSANCE

The history of Europe during the four or five centuries
succeeding the fall of the Eoman Empire is a dark and
Thecondi- ^o^pl®^ record. The five great nations were
tion of evolving themselves out of the chaotic materials

Europe

after the aflTorded, on the one hand, by the wrecks of the
Boman ^ old civilisations, and on the other by the young
Empire barbarian hordes of the North, ever reinforced
by the influx of wandering tribes from Asia. Italians,
Celts, Goths, Huns and Northmen were all clashing together
in a blind struggle for existence. This was the birth-
time of modern Christian Europe, a birth-time attended
by many throes of agony, of internecine strife, of tyranny
and bloodshed. It was necessary that languages should
be formed, boundaries fixed, methods of government
tried, Christianity developed, before any kind of order
or coherence could arise out of so many conflicting
elements.

A chief cause of the unsettled condition of Europe
was that mysterious wandering of nations southwards and
westwards, which is called the Northern Migrations; a
constant tendency of the German tribes to push south-
wards, which had shown itself even before the time of
CaBsar, and which was much accelerated during the
fourth century by the appearance in the East of Europe of
wild hordes of Asiatic savages, who hovered threateningly
on the boundaries of civilisation, and then poured in,
and swept in numbers that defied resistance, over Eastern
and Central Europe, settling, for the most part, in
Germany.

It was not until the eleventh century, when the North-
men had established themselves in England and in the



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THE MIDDLE AGES 3

South of Italy, that the last reverberations of the great
* people's-wandering ' died away. The darkest times for
^modern Europe were now over. Italy, France, Germany,
and from England and Spain had attained to some
eleventh degree of coherence and individuality. By
fift^nth *^® ©li^rgy and striving of those early centuries,
century when Europe was, as it were, a melting-pot of
chaotic races, the social and political institutions which
constitute the ^machinery' of the Middle Ages, as we
know them between the eleventh and the fifteenth
century, had been developed and organised. A brief
glance at the history of these institutions will show how
each, having served its own good purpose for a time, was
slowly but inevitably working out its own destruction ; so
that by the close of the fourteenth century all things
pointed to revolution and change.

First, and most important, is the Ecclesiastical system,
the greatest and most potent of all the magnificent ideals
by which the Middle Ages were inspired. At
medieevai this time (the eleventh century) the spiritual
^° influence of the Church was at its highest. All
historians, of whatever school, are agreed that the benefit
of this influence over the young, half-formed nations was of
inestimable value. Without forcing her opinions on the
Pagan and barbarian races among whom she had penetrated,
she had insensibly won their respect by her practical setting
forth of principles of justice, charity, and universal
brotherhood, and had so impressed them with her solemn
and venerable rites that they had submitted themselves to
her guidance, and had allowed her to mediate between
the conquerors and the conquered. She had held up

b2



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4 THE EENAISSANCE

before the eyes of quarrelsome races the great idea of a
world-wide unity, and had succeeded in drawing them
together under a common head in the bonds of a common
faith. Slavery disappeared before her as she taught and
practised the truth of human equality before God. By
the example of her monks — toiling in field and workshop
— she redeemed manual labour from the contempt in
which it was held, not only by the ancients, but by those
later nations whose freemen all bore arms. While ever
discouraging individual rebellion against authority, she
was always ready to oppose the tyranny of despotic
sovereigns ; to send out an Anselm, a Becket, a Langton,
who should testify that there is a law above a tyrant's
will, and help the voiceless people to obtain their
charters of liberty. The monasteries were oases of refine-
ment and love in a howling wilderness of ignorance and
brutality. In them the wanderer might find rest, the sick
might be nursed, the ignorant taught, the hungry fed, and
the naked clothed. The teaching of the monks and the
stateliness of the ritual kept the idea of high and heavenly
things before the minds of men who lived in a rude,
barbarous, and unthinking age. The religious life set
forth an example of the sternest, most heroic self-denial,
of whole-hearted devotion and resolute endurance, among
people given up to the grossest animalism. The Popes
had not yet made any aggressive demands for temporal or
even spiritual power. Heretics were few, and little
regarded, for there was no predisposition among the
people to listen to heresies : the Catholic faith suflSced for
all their needs. It was no mere department of their lives,
but it dominated their whole existence, from the first breath



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THE MIDDLE AGES 6

to the last, and was the basis of all their political, social'
and municipal relations.

To us who look back it is evident that the eleventh
century wfis the time of the Church's truest greatness ;
but this was by no means apparent at the time, for all
through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she was
steadily growing in wealth and importance, until the most
powerful of secular monarchs had to give way beneath
her ban. And yet all this time her hold upon the hearts
of the people was being gradually, insidiously loosened.
If we ask, in wonder, how it was that, in spite of her
splendid organisation, her ancient prestige, her widespread
influence, and her noble record of great achievement, the
mediaeval Church had, by the end of the fourteenth century,
lost so much of her inspiring power, we find the answer in
two important facts.

In the first place, as we shall see more plainly presently,
she would not adapt herself to the changing conditions of
changing times, would not sympathise with her growing
children when they reached the inevitable age of wonder,
inquiry, and doubt. Entrenching herself in an iron con-
servatism, she replied to their anxious questionings with
threats and blows, and so initiated that terrible record of
persecution by fire and sword which darkens the history of
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries — those
horrors of which the massacre of the Albigenses, and
the establishment of the Inquisition by Innocent III.
at the beginning of the thirteenth century, are th^ first i



landmarks. ^;p.(^- nTTOrS ' Jp W »7l\Vilp^te
In the second place, the downfall or the mediaeval ^

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6 THE RENAISSANCE

who heaped wealth and honour upon her until she sank
beneath their weight. Most of the great failures of the
Middle Ages were caused by the fact that the framers of its
lofty ideals omitted to take into account the weakness of
human nature. Thus Hildebrand, in his splendid theory
of the Pope as supreme ruler, serene dispenser of equity to
the sovereigns of the world, did not foresee that, in order
to maintain this supremacy, the Pope would have to
vie with ambitious monarchs, to fight as an Italian prince
among other Italian princes, and so lose the dignity
that clung about him as spiritual head ; did not remember
that, in natures inferior to his own, wealth and power
beget the greed — nay, almost the necessity — for more
wealth and power ; did not see that, at the least, so great
a temporal responsibility would bring about the result
that the head of the Church and her other great digni-
taries would be chosen for their qualities as statesmen and
diplomatists rather than as divines. Just in the same way,
as the wealth of the monasteries increased, their heads
necessarily became men of business, able to manage the
affairs of large estates, and to deal with important matters
of finance ; so that, step by step, the spiritual ideal was
lowered and became merged in worldliness; increased
wealth brought about a more luxurious style of living, and
the severity of discipline was relaxed. Thus the way was
prepared for that looseness, that depravity of morals, which,
in its dark contrast to a noble and revered ideal, smote with
such painful sharpness on the minds of thinking men ;
while the effect produced on the mass of the people, when
they saw those whom they had been taught to respect and
whom they believed to have unlimited power over their



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THE MIDDLE AGES 7

souls, sunk in infamous crimes, was a mixture of abject
superstition with an entire disregard for morality.

The beginning of the fourteenth century saw the fall of
the Papacy, when, transferred to Avignon, it grovelled at "5.
the feet of the French king. The Captivity was followed
by forty years of Schism, when rival Popes disputed for the
tiara ; and if anything further was needed to complete the
painful disillusionment, it was added when the necessity
for money induced the Popes to sanction the deplorable Y
trade in indulgences, pardons and dispensations; and
when the clergy, not content with opening shops, in which,
owing to their immunity from taxation, they could under-
sell the merchants, began to extort money right and left
by that unholy spiritual traffic.

The Holy Roman Empire was another of those great
ideas by which, so much more than by hard facts, the
„, „ , Middle Affes were guided. The mediaeval mind

The Holy ,^ ° ° . ^ ,. . ,

Roman could no more conceive of a political system
°^P^^® without the Emperor at its head than of a reli-
gious system without the Pope at its head. Emperor
and Pope were alike the Vicars of God, appointed to rule
over all Christendom. Of the Emperors it was only
Charlemagne, the first and greatest, who even approximately
realised this great pretension ; but from his time down to
the fourteenth century the turbid course of European
politics was dominated and directed by the Imperial idea.
This influence proved indeed disastrous; for from the
time of the Emperor Otho an indissoluble connection was
established between the throne of Germany and the Empire,
so that to be elected King of Germany gave the right to
be crowned as Emperor. Italy, dividing her allegiance



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8 THE EENAISSANCE

between ^ an unarmed Pontiff and an absent Emperor/
lost all hope of becoming an united and patriotic nation ;
while the German Kingdom, which, under the early
Emperors, was at the hei^t of power and prosperity,
gradually * broke down beneath the weight of the Roman
Empire.' The elective system fostered self-seeking and
family aggrandisement in the Emperors, who at the same
time, by merging their kingship in the Empire, lost
control over their dominions, and gave up practical
sovereignty for a nominal supremacy over a wider realm
than they were able to govern. Meanwhile, as the
temporal power and ambition of the Papacy increased, the
two potentates, instead of supporting and strengthening
one another, according to the original intention, became
bitterly antagonistic ; indeed, the relations between them
led at last to the somewhat perplexing situation in which
the Pope excommunicates the Emperor, while the Emperor
at the same time deposes the Pope. A long and bitter
struggle between the two powers ensued, which, begin-
ning with the War of Investitures, became merged in the
terrible protracted feud between Guelfs and Ghibellines,
and lasted far on into the fifteenth century.

The supreme Emperor formed but the fitting coping-
stone to the Feudal System, which step by step led up to
such a head. By the eleventh century this
Feudal System (first fully developed by Charlemagne)
^^ ^^ was adopted in almost every country in Europe,
with the fortunate exception of .Italy. Beneficent in its
origin, it became one of the greatest of the stumbling-
blocks that hindered the progress of civilisation. Regard-
ing it from below, we see how the people of the Germans —



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THE MroDLE AGES 9

thongh in early days the freest of all the European nations —
were pressed upon by Northmen from without and harassed
by nobles and great officials within until they gradually
gave up all their political, and most of their personal, rights
in return for the patronage and protection of those who
were more powerful ; we see the little hovels crouching
round the base of the frowning castle, and we see the
formation of a miserable Serf class, creatures who were
considered as the absolute chattels of their master, robbed
of the most elementary rights of humanity, degraded,
despised, and beaten down, until there was little more soul
left in them than in the clods of the eart.h they ploughed.
We see, too, that in the great bare halls of the castle
itself, where so many heterogeneous individuals were
herded together, there was no possibility of home life or of
domestic comfort. Eating, drinking, fighting, debauchery
and the chase make up the routine of day after day, until,
perhaps, the poor dumb people find a sudden strength, and,
weary of the arrogance and ferocity of their oppressors,
turn and rend them, as they did in the peasant wars in
France and Germany. Eegarding the Feudal System
from above, we see a victorious king granting portions of
his widening territory to his most distinguished knights
in return for allegiance and the promise of military service,
and these in turn sub-letting portions of their fiefs on
corresponding terms ; so that the whole kingdom was to
be gathered in a subtle network, which could be drawn
together at a word from the Throne. And then we find
that the great nobles have become equal in power to their
sovereign, that he is unable to compel their obedience, and
has to resort to all kinds of shifts to maintain his power —



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10 THE KENAISSANCE

to buy the favour of the clergy and to improve the positioD
of the townspeople, who were always ready to take part
against the nobles ; and that even then he is constantly
obliged to give way. We find, too, sometimes, that the
nobles, instead of uniting against the king, turn against
one another, and set the whole country ablaze with civil
war while they hunt down and destroy each other, as in
the Wars of the Eoses in England.

It was from the Feudal System, however, that there

sprang the one gleam of softer light which throws over

the Middle Ages the glamour of romance. Chivalry,

with its high enthusiasm and its wonderfully noble

ideal of perfect manhood, is another of the great

Cnivalry

thoughts of the Middle Ages. It was French in
its origin, but it soon flourished in almost every Court in
Europe. It was the result of a mingling of the French
romantic and devotional spirit with the Norman love of
adventure ; both these uniting to produce the ideal cha-
racter, the knight sans peur et sans reproche. Chivalry was
not developed until the eleventh century, but with it there
always existed a kind of pathetic groping backward, a
consciousness of present failure, and a belief that what
was, indeed, only a beautiful idea must once have had a real
existence. Hence it was that the legends of the knights
of Arthur and of Charlemagne exercised so strong a fasci-
nation. In them could be found true knighthood and
gallant adventures, whereas in real life it too often
appeared that the love of warlike deeds had become a
mere propensity to violence and brutality, that jousts and
tourneys were but scenes of lawless riot, where old scores
might easily be settled by a deft stroke in the m61ee ;



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THE MIDDLE AGES 11

that the reverential love of womanhood had degenerated
into empty gallantry, mere admiration of beauty, and was
leading to the profligacy which so disgraced the later
Middle Ages. Instead of winning his lady by heroic deeds,
the Provencal, knight disputed for her in fantastic tensons
in the Courts of Love; or, like the love-penitent of
Languedoc, proved the ardour of his passion by dressing
in gauze in winter and wearing heavy furs in summer ; or
would hire some shepherd to hunt him over the hills as a
wolf, that he might fall at last wounded and abject at his
lady's door. And it is as well to remind ourselves occa-
sionally that the lady whose sleeve the amorous knight
wore as his favour, and to whom his plaintive love-songs
were addressed, was almost invariably, owing to the
constitution of society, already the wife of some one else.
That which was heroic in the spirit of the Middle
Ages found a more effective, because more practical, expres-
The sion in the Crusades. Although of the thou-

Crusades gan^g ^ho embarked upon that great enterprise
there were doubtless many for whom the only object was
fame, or profit, or plunder ; many who only sought such
privileges as were accorded by Papal or Imperial decree to
those who received the Eed Cross ; many who were willing
to atone for a life of sin by the excitement of a martyr's
death — yet it was in the main a high and unselfish impulse T
which led the noblest knights in Europe to fling away
their lives in countless numbers upon the Holy Quest.
The history of the Crusades is one of bright hopes and
brief successes, followed by bitter disappointments and
failures ; of a fitful zeal ; nay, often of a wanton perversion
of holy things, when Popes proclaimed Crusades against



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12 THE RENAISSANCE

their fellow-Christians or against their personal enemies.