The Atlantic Monthly, page 109 by Various Authors
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supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man, who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable forms of antiquity are treated. Nothing can be more superficial than this varnish of classicality. The names of Cicero, Brutus, Augustus were in all mouths; but the real character of these men, or of any others, or of the times they lived in, was very slightly realized. The classic architecture, with its cogent adaptation and sequence of parts, is cut up into theatre-scenery: its "members" are members no longer, but scraps to be stuck about at will. The gods and heroes of the ancient world have become the pageant of a holiday; even the sacred legends of the Church receive only an outward respect, and at last not even that. Claude wants a foreground-figure and puts in Æneas, Diana, or Moses, he cares little which, and he would hear, unmoved, Mr. Ruskin's eloquent denunciation of their utter unfitness for the assumed character, and the absurdity of the whole action of the piece.
But the Renaissance had its religion, too,--namely, Culture. The one "virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers, despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was hard to be a good citiz