But, while the splendor and dignity of the Italian religious pictures were inspired by the religious fervor that had continued from medieval times, they also reflected the new impulse which had made possible the Renaissance: the New Learning, the study of the classics, particularly of Hellenic culture, preëminently of Plato. From the latter, scholars and artists alike had learned to think in terms of the abstract. To the artists had been revealed the abstract idea of beauty--of beauty as at once the symbol and the expression of the highest good in life and thought. They were no longer satisfied simply to represent the sacred story and doctrines; they would have their pictures beautiful, independently of the subject; they would give the subject itself a higher significance through the abstract beauty of the compositions in which it was embodied. Hence the principles of technical distinction that began to sublimate their pictures, until they reached a degree of abstract as well as material elevation that has never been, and, one imagines, will never be surpassed. For it was the offspring of two motives that may never again be found in wedlock--the religious need and the need of expressing the enthusiasm for the cult of the classics. The former may still be operative, but the latter has been dissipated in the spread of the democratic idea.
And what was the principle upon which was based the classic ideal of abstract beauty, as it expressed itself in Italian painting? It was the supreme motive of the human form, as being, in its harmony of proportions and its rhythm of movement, the symbol and expression of abstract beauty. Again it happened that the teaching of the Church conjoined with the speculations of scholars. This world was thought to be the center of the universe; man was the axis of the world. Even God was interpreted as concerned chiefly in the rewarding or punishment of man, while to man all other created things were subordinate. To the imagination of the Renaissance, as of the Middle Ages, man towered up supreme against the mere background of the universe. Small wonder if some men, seizing the logic of this, aspired to be the owners of the bodies and souls of their fellows, and scarcely less that the others acquiesced! It was a rôle not only for popes, emperors, and kings to play upon the stage of the world, but for every princeling and duke to strut through on some smaller platform of a municipality. It justified the Medici in their own eyes, and made them almost of necessity the patrons of artists who had accepted the supremacy of such as they for the leading motive of their art. The painters, in fact, accepting the exclusive aristocracy of the human figure, adopting as their prime motive its ideal perfection, and building up compositions in which the figures were arranged in conformity with the rhythms and proportions derived from such ideal perfection, necessarily achieved an art that was essentially aristocratic, fitted for the temples of an aristocratic church and the palaces of the lay aristocracy. Yet, to repeat, it was also inspired by a great religious need, so that it was fitted for the masses as well as for their rulers.