's mind
that later generations interpreted Duerer's knight as a picture of
Sickingen or Hutten or one of the bold champions of the new religion.

In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating
the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little
bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study,
{685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has
also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever
before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the
vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds but,
withal, the soul still yearned for more. The vanity of knowledge is
expressed as nowhere else in Duerer's Melancholia, one of the world's
greatest pictures. Surrounded by scientific instruments,--the compass,
the book, the balance, the hammer, the arithmetical square, the
hour-glass, the bell--sits a woman with wings too small to raise her
heavy body. Far in the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of
the Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits the little
bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disordered fancy of an overwrought
mind.

[Sidenote: The Grotesque]

Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance is the love of the
grewsome. In Duerer it took the harmless form of a fondness for
monstrosities,--rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the
like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the emotions of their
contemporaries by painting long series known as the Dance of Death, in
which some man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the emperor,
the soldier, the peasant, the bride, is represented as being haled from
life by a grinning skeleton.

Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now drawn into the service of
the intense party struggles of the Reformation. To depict the pope or
Luther or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew them with
claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's tails, drinking and
blaspheming. Even kings were caricatured,--doubly significant fact!

[Sidenote: Architecture]

As painting and sculpture attained so high a level of maturity in the
sixteenth century, one might suppose that architecture would do the same.
In truth, {686} however, architecture rather declined. Very often, if
not always, each special art-form goes through a cycle of youth,
perfection, and decay, that remind one str