of agony
    From its white parted lips.  And still I marvel
    At the three Rhodian artists, by whose hands
    This miracle was wrought.  Yet he beholds
    Far nobler works who looks upon the ruins
    Of temples in the Forum here in Rome. 
    If God should give me power in my old age
    To build for him a temple half as grand
    As those were in their glory, I should count
    My age more excellent than youth itself,
    And all that I have hitherto accomplished
    As only vanity.”

“It was an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized, complete.  Artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world had elevated and made keen, breathed a common air and caught light and heat from each other’s thoughts.  It is this unity of spirit which gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance, and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of its grave dignity and influence."[A]

[A] Walter Pater:  “Studies in the Renaissance.”

It is to this unity of the arts we owe the fact that the art of beautifying the home took its proper place.  During the Middle Ages the Church had absorbed the greater part of the best man had to give, and home life was rather a hit or miss affair, the house was a fortress, the family possessions so few that they could be packed into chests and easily moved.  During the Renaissance the home ideal grew, and, although the Church still claimed the best, home life began to have comforts and beauties never dreamed of before.  The walls glowed with color, tapestries and velvets added their beauties, and the noble proportions of the marble halls made a rich background for the elaborately carved furniture.

The doors of Italian palaces were usually inlaid with woods of light shade, and the soft, golden tone given by the process was in beautiful, but not too strong, contrast with the marble architrave of the doorway, which in the fifteenth century was carved in low relief combined with disks of colored marble, sliced, by the way, from Roman temple pillars.  Later as the classic taste became stronger the carving gave place to a plain architrave and the over-door took the form of a pediment.

Mantels were of marble, large, beautifully carved, with the fireplace sunk into the thickness of the wall.  The overmantel usually had a carved panel, but later, during the sixteenth century, this was sometimes replaced by a picture.  The windows of the Renaissance were a part of the decoration of the room, and curtains were not used in our modern manner, but served only to keep out the draughts.  In those days the better the house the simpler the curtains.  There were many kinds of ceilings used, marble, carved wood, stucco, and painting.  They were elaborate and beautiful, and always gave the impression of being