CHAPTER VII

Summary

The reform of learning advanced by slower steps than the progress of the fine arts by which it was accompanied. The Italians devoted themselves to a vigorous realism; the supernatural vanished from their art, while forms assumed more natural and intelligible outlines. Out of the fulness of southern life was evolved a whole realm of joyous beauty, the monumental remains of which, united to those of antiquity, still form the essential art treasures of the human race.

Neo-Latin art.

Neo-Latin art was moreover more original than neo-classic literature. Beyond some decorative patterns, painting had no ancient models; it remained essentially the national art of Italy and always maintained its dependence on Christianity. Sculpture, on the contrary, the pagan step-child of the Church, although provided by antiquity with a copious supply of models, stood far in the rear. As for architecture, she had nothing but ruins before her eyes ; the temples of Sicily and Greece still remained unheeded or unknown. The Italians naturally enough neither reproduced a temple nor did they build baths or villas after the designs of the ancients; they turned aside from Gothic, which Humanism regarded as barbarous and unnatural, and reverted to classic styles, to the proportions and surfaces of antiquity, to Roman lines and intercolumniations.