The Classical Renaissance was something different in kind from what I have called the Christian Renaissance.  It must be placed somewhere between 1350 and 1600.  Place it where you will.  For my part I always think of it as the gorgeous and well-cut garment of the years that fall between 1453 and 1594, between the capture of Constantinople and the death of Tintoretto.  To me, it is the age of Lionardo, of Charles VIII and Francis I, of Cesare Borgia and Leo X, of Raffael, of Machiavelli, and of Erasmus, who carries us on to the second stage, the period of angry ecclesiastical politics, of Clement VII, Fontainebleau, Rabelais, Titian, Palladio, and Vasari.  But, on any computation, in the years that lie between the spiritual exaltation of the early twelfth century and the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical Renaissance.  Whatever happened, happened between those dates.  And all that did happen was nothing more than a change from late manhood to early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new hobbies and occupations.  The decline from the eleventh to the seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from the world of Aurelian to the world of Gregory the Great is catastrophic.  Since the Christian Renaissance, new ideas and knowledge notwithstanding, the world has grown rotten with decency and order.  It takes more than the rediscovery of Greek texts and Graeco-Roman statues to provoke the cataclysms and earthquakes with which it grew young.

The art of the High Renaissance was conditioned by the demands of its patrons.  There is nothing odd about that; it is a recognised stage in the rake’s progress.  The patrons of the Renaissance wanted plenty of beauty of the kind dear to the impressionable stock-jobber.  Only, the plutocrats of the sixteenth century had a delicacy and magnificence of taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern stock-jobbers intolerable to them.  Renaissance millionaires could be vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen.  They were neither illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society.  Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian’s and of Veronese’s women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and obvious willingness to be kissed.  That beauty for which can be substituted the word “desirableness,” and that insignificant beauty which is the beauty of gems, were in great demand.  Imitation was wanted, too; for if pictures are to please as suggestions and mementoes, the objects that suggest and remind must be adequately portrayed.  These pictures had got to stimulate the emotions of life, first; aesthetic emotion was a secondary matter.  A Renaissance picture was meant to say just those things that a patron would like to hear.  That way lies the end of art:  however wicked it may be to try to shock the public, it is not so wicked as trying to please it.  But whatever the Italian painters of the Renaissance had to say they said in