It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that this great classical revival in Italy came, this re-birth of a true sense of beauty which is called the Renaissance.  It was an age of wonders, of great artistic creations, and was one of the great epochs of the world, one of the turning points of human existence.  It covered so large a field and was so many-sided that only careful study can give a full realization of the giants of intellect and power who made its greatness, and who left behind them work that shows the very quintessence of genius.

Italy, stirring slightly in the fourteenth century, woke and rose to her greatest heights in the fifteenth and sixteenth.  The whole people responded to the new joy of life, the love of learning, the expression of beauty in all its forms.  All notes were struck,—­gay, graceful, beautiful, grave, cruel, dignified, reverential, magnificent, but all with an exuberance of life and power that gave to Italian art its great place in human culture.  The great names of the period speak for themselves,—­Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Machiavelli, Benvenuto Cellini, and a host of others.

The inspiration of the Renaissance came largely from the later Greek schools of art and literature, Alexandria and Rhodes and the colonies in Sicily and Italy, rather than ancient Greece.  It was also the influence which came to ancient Rome at its most luxurious period.  The importance of the taking of Alexandria and Constantinople in 1453 must not be underestimated, as it drove scholars from the great libraries of the East carrying their manuscripts to the nobles and priests and merchant princes of Italy who thus became enthusiastic patrons of learning and art.  This later type of Greek art lacked the austerity of the ancient type, and to the models full of joy and beauty and suffering, the Italians of the Renaissance added the touch of their own temperament and made them theirs in the glowing, rich and astounding way which has never been equaled and probably never will be.  Perfection of line and beauty was not sufficient, the soul with its capacity for joy and suffering, “the soul with all its maladies” as Pater says, had become a factor.  The impression made upon Michelangelo by seeing the Laocooen disinterred is vividly described by Longfellow—­

[Illustration:  An exquisite and true Renaissance feeling is shown in the pilasters.]

[Illustration:  The Italian Renaissance is still inspiring the world.  In the two doorways the use of pilasters and frieze, and the pedimented and round over-door motifs are typical of the period.]

                “Long, long years ago,
    Standing one morning near the Baths of Titus,
    I saw the statue of Laocoeon
    Rise from its grave of centuries like a ghost
    Writhing in pain; and as it tore away
    The knotted serpents from its limbs, I heard,
    Or seemed to hear, the cry