the human body.  This final emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting.  Gazing at Michael Angelo’s prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally religious.  But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of Pheidias.  Titian’s Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.  Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional.  Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here.  It went further, and plunged into Paganism.  Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.

Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of antique civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister.  It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas.  During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of Boethius—­and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints—­together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace.  The Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature.  At the same time the Bible in its original tongues was rediscovered.  Mines of Oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions.  The Aryan and Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison.  With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship ’Litterae Humaniores,’—­the more human literature, or the literature that humanizes.

There are three stages in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance.  The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period.  They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture.  Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries.  Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosimo de Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first