The Penguin Book of the Renaissance [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION /. H. Plumb /RT reflects society - its aspirations, confusions, and inheri-k tance. But the future is there as well as the past and the ^ great ages of man only have meaning so long as they ^ create modes of expression and behaviour which will | hold unborn generations in unconscious subjection. And this was peculiarly true of the Renaissance in Italy which started themes capable of infinite variation, so that Shakespeare and Poussin, and even Isaac Newton and Edward Gibbon, were carried along by its impetus into new worlds of creative achievement. Iconoclastic scholars have behttled the originality of the Renaissance; attempts have been made to isolate it; to demonstrate its overwhelming debt to former ages; to confine it to the realm of art. Not even the most prejudiced medievalist, however, can deny the astonishing vigour and originality of fifteenth-century Italy in painting, in sculpture, and ir. architecture. True, it adds depth to our understanding to realize the power of Gothic influence in the tragic nudes of Michelangelo and to appreciate the ironic handling of his inheritance by Uccello. Yet, as these splendid pages show, artists from the days of Masaccio to the death of Tintoretto not only equalled the triumphs of Greece and Rome, to which they were so deeply indebted, but excelled them. By their exploration of perspective, of landscape, ofthe nude, and ofthe human face, they opened up fresh dimensions in art. Although there were aspects of Renaissance painting that are as private and as esoteric as anything that modern art can produce, yet mostly it possessed a universality of appeal that shows little sign of diminishing, even as the last relics of the social