Euphorion - Vol. I Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance

Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen by their predecessors? At first o...

This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last having struck the fancy of a real po...

As it was with literature, so likewise was it with art. The most purely mediæval sculpture, the sculpture which has, as it were, just detached itself from the capitals and porch...

These are the main causes of the immorality of the Renaissance: first, the general disbelief in all accepted doctrines, due to the falseness and unnaturalness of those hitherto...

This anomaly, this unsatisfactory character of the works of both Botticelli and Mantegna, is mainly technical; the antique is frustrated in Botticelli, not so much by the Christ...

For Italy, beggared and maimed (by her own unthrift, by the rapacity of others, by the order of Fate) at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was never able to weave for hers...

how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for monstrous crimes with which to horrify their stay-at-home countrymen; how the rich young lords, returning home with mincing...

But this system of the free town contained in itself, as does every other institution, the seed of death--contained it in that expanding element which developes, ripens, rots, a...

_Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages--its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping...

Nor must such anomalies between the type of the men and their deeds, between their abominable crimes and their high qualities, be merely made a subject for grandiloquent disquis...

The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of business, constantly in contact with...

This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its disposal. We see it, notice it, and e...

A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always cheerful, rational, civilized--this is what the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for spirits at al...

They did not imitate the antique, they studied it; they obtained through the fragments of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that glimpse served to corr...