ble-mind of the Renaissance, the source of its weakness
in art as in thought, could not be avoided, because humanity at this
moment had to lose the mediaeval sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the
spirit of a bygone civilisation. This, for better or for worse, was the
phase through which the intellect of modern Europe was obliged to pass;
and those who have confidence in the destinies of the human race, will not
spend their strength in moaning over such shortcomings as the periods of
transition bring inevitably with them. The student of Italian history may
indeed more reasonably be allowed to question whether the arts, if left to
follow their own development unchecked, might not have recovered from the
confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a stage of nobler
activity through earnest and unaffected study of nature. But the
enslavement of the country, together with the counter-Reformation,
suspended the Renaissance in mid-career; and what remains of Italian art
is incomplete. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the confusion of
opinions consequent upon the clash of the modern with the ancient world,
left no body of generally accepted beliefs to express; nor has the time
even yet arrived for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favourable
to the activity of the figurative arts.

Sansovino himself was neither original nor powerful enough, to elevate the
mixed motives of Renaissance sculpture by any lofty idealisation. To do
that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness of Michael Angelo consists
in this--that while literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies
and the filth of the Bernesque "Capitoli," while the barefaced villanies
of Aretino won him credit, while sensual magnificence formed the ideal of
artists who were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto found no
subject fitter for his genius than a glittering romance, he and he alone
maintained the Dantesque dignity of the Italian intellect in his
sculpture. Michael Angelo stands so far apart from other men, and is so
gigantic a force for good and evil in the history of art, that to estimate
his life and labour in relation to the Renaissance must form the subject
of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his
immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli,
caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and
agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the stro