the civilization of the renaissance in italy

The rest of Europe was free either to repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came forth from Italy.

In the modern Latin literature of the period, it is very small, while in the visual arts, as well as in other spheres, it is remarkably great and hence the alliance between two distant epochs in the civilization of the same people, because concluded on equal terms, proved justifiable and fruitful. The amount of independence which the national spirit maintained in this union varied according to circumstances. We must insist upon it, as one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world. The Renaissance would not have been the process of world-wide significance which it is, if its elements could be so easily separated from one another. But both what has gone before and what we have still to discuss are colored in a thousand ways by the influence of the ancient world and though the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival, it is only with and through this revival that they are actually manifested to us. The conditions which have been hitherto described would have sufficed, apart from antiquity, to upturn and to mature the national mind and most of the intellectual tendencies which yet remain to be noticed would be conceivable without it. Now that this point in our historical view of Italian civilization has been reached, it is time to speak of the influence of antiquity, the 'new birth' of which has been one-sidedly chosen as the name to sum up the whole period. Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity » Introductory » The Ruins of Rome » The Classics » The Humanists » Universities and Schools » Propagators of Antiquity » Epistolography: Latin Orators » The Treatise, and History in Latin » Antiquity as the Common Source » Neo-Latin Poetry » Fall of the Humanists in the Sixteenth Century

The civilization of the renaissance in italy