TIIE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
With the Renaissance in the fifteenth century came the study of man for man's sake, the rise of individualism. The more imaginative and religious art of the preceding age was lost, and in its place we find a close imitation of nature, a study of psychology, bringing in its train natural ism and realism. This change had been for some time in prepgration in all spheres of thought as well as of art and science, and in all these the new era, in which the Humanistic principle was supreme, was inaugurated almost simultaneously, though the intellectual branches were foremost in the field. Italy was the focus of this movement, and here it worked and developed sonic time before spreading to other lands.
The Renaissance is so named especially because its mainspring was a return to pagan ideals and a casting of of the religions ideas that had until that time ruled Christendom. When popes and princes vied in bringing to light and studying the intellectual and artistic remains of antiquity, and in endeavoring to reproduce the life and thought of pre Christian times, the result was an overturning of all the old order, the fostering of unbridled license, and great abuses on which the efforts of nobler, but fewer, good men had but slight effect; for what was mainly imitated, because better known, was that period of decadence of imperial Rome which of all periods of antiquity was the worst.
Periods and Artists of the Early Renaissance in art, with these two currents of realism and of classicism, may be roughly divided into two periods, each covering about a century. (I) The fifteenth century saw an early, refined Renaissance; (2) the sixteenth, an extrava gant and riotous Renaissance that cared but little for classic canons of taste. The leading artists in the field of sculpture during the period of the early Renaissance were Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, all men of genius in their way; hut of these the leader was Donatello. His spirit was the embodiment of what was strongest and best in the Renaissance; he was its true representative, while Ghiberti stood alone on a by-way, and Luca della Robbia was the last but one of the greatest representatives of the Christian ideal, and therefore stood for the past rather than the present.
Gales of the Florence Ghiberti 1455) appears as a connecting link between the two schools, and his two bronze gates in the Baptistery of Florence may be considered as both an epitome of his own development and a proof of the rapidity with which the change in the arts was then going on. Ghiberti, in modelling, in 1403, his first or northern gate, with twenty-eight reliefs, of which the greater part relates to the history of our Lord, followed very closely the general arrangement, composition, and style of the southern gate which Andrea Pisano had cast three-quarters of a century before (see page 75).
The Annunciation (f1 23, jig. 2), from the gate of Ghiberti, when placed side by side with Andrea's Meeting of Mary and Elisabeth (Jig. 3), brings out this resemblance, though there is less simplicity and more attempt at graceful and rich effects. But when, nineteen years after, in 1424, Ghiberti commenced his second or eastern gate, which Michelangelo pronounced worthy to be called the Gates of Paradise, lie exchanged his primitive simplicity for studied elaboration and his true sculpturesque manner for one entirely pictorial. The panels are large and square, and number only ten instead of twenty-eight. The subjects are taken from the Old Testament, and each panel, instead of one, often contains three or four scenes; these are laid in an elaborate setting of landscape with trees and hills, rivers and clouds, with lines graduated according to the laws of per spective. The figures of the foreground stand out in high relief, being almost iletached from the background, and as the eye follows the scene the figures are seen to be in half relief, then in low relief, then in and finally are indicated merely in outline as they melt away in the dim distance. They are in reality paintings cast in bronze.