§ 66. THE ARTISTS. 599
They divided their triumphs between Florence and Rome, but imparted their magic touch to many other Italian cities, including Venice, which had remained cold to the literary movement. Here again Rome drew upon Florence for painters such as Giotto and Fra Angelico, and for sculptors such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Michelangelo.
While the Italy of the 15th century — or the quattrocento, as the Italians call it — was giving expression to her own artistic conceptions in color and marble and churchly dome, masterpieces of ancient sculpture, restless, in the graves where for centuries they had had rude sepulture, came forth to excite the admiring astonishment of a new generation. What the age of Nicolas V. was for the discovery of manuscripts, the age of Julius II. was for the discovery of classic Greek statuary. The extensive villa of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, which extended over several miles and embraced a theatre, lyceum, temple, basilica, library, and race-course, alone furnished immense treasures of art. Others were found in the bed of the Tiber or brought from Greece or taken from the Roman baths, where their worth had not been discerned. In Alexander VI. 's pontificate the Apollo Belvedere was found ; under Julius II. the torso of Hercules, the Laocoon group ^ and the Vatican Venus. The Greek ideals of human beauty were again revealed and kindled an enthusiasm for similar achievements.
Petrarca's collections were repeated. Paul II. deposited his rich store of antiquities in his palace of San Marco. In Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici was active in securing pieces of ancient art. The museum on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where Nicolas V. seems to have restored the entire palace of the senate, dates from 1471, one of its earliest treasures being the statue of Marcus Aurelius. The Vatican museum was the creation of Julius II. To these museums and the museums in Florence were added the galleries of private collectors.
In architecture, the Renaissance artists never adopted the stern Gothic of the North. In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti
1 The discovery of the Laocoon in a vineyard in Rome was "like a Jubilee." Michelangelo was one of the first to see it. Sadoleto praised it in Latin verses. See description in Klaczko, W. 93-96.
600 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
showed to Nicolas V. a copy of his De re cedijicatoria, a work on architecture, based upon his studies of the Roman monuments. Nicolas opened the line of great builders in Rome and his plans were on a splendid scale.
The art of the Renaissance blends the glorification of jnedipevaF Catholicisniwith the charms of classical paganism, the history of the Bible with the mythology of Greece and Rome. The earlier painters of the 14th and 15th centuries were more simple, chaste and devout than those of the 16th, who reached a higher distinction as artists. The Catholic type of piety is sliown in the preponderance of the pictures of the Madonna holding the infant Saviour in her arms or on her lap and in the portraiture of St. Sebastian and other saints. Heavenly beauty and earthly sensuality meet side by side, and the latter often draws attention away from the former. The same illustrious painters, saj'S Hawthorne, in the Marble Faun, " seem to take up one task or the other — the disrobed woman whom they called Venus, or the type of highest and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour — with equal readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success." One moment the painter represented Bacchus wedding Ariadne and another depicted Mary on the hill of Calvary. Michelangelo now furnished the Pieta for St. Peter's, now designed the Rape of Ganymede for Vittoria Colonna and the statue of the drunken Bacchus for the Roman Jacopo Galli. Titian's Magdalen in the Pitti gallery, Florence, exhibits in one person the voluptuous woman with exposed breasts and flowing locks and the penitent saint looking up to heaven. Of Sandro Botticelli, Vasari said that "in many homes he painted of naked women a plenty." If, however, the Christian religion furnished only to a single writer, Dante, the subject of his poem, it furnished to all the painters and sculptors many subjects from both Testaments and also from Church history, for the highest productions of their genius.
In looking tUmugh the long list of distinguished sculptors, painters and architects who illuminated their native Italy in the Renaissancejeriod, on<j la struck with the high age wTTich many of them reached a"d,"~I>t. th^ j^fiTTTp: tii|^p,