r they
were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the
new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on the
dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct
charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their own
sake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its
own. When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem was
mingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower
grew up from it, unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone with
its concentric rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by
those who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma.
Just such a strange flower was that mythology of the Italian
Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two
sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was regarded as
so much imaginative material to be received and assimilated. It did not
come into men's minds to ask curiously of science concerning its origin,
its primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. It
sank into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it
of medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of
the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and with
it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac
revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had
introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he
has given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the
older and more primitive "Mighty Mother."

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to
the art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della
Mirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive.
He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turn
again to the pages of his forgotten books, although we know already that
the actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little as
perhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness for
mysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection of
cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the story
might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the way
of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to
system, and hazarded much; but less