The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Then the Middle Ages melt away, and suddenly we stand before that full flowering of medieval art and thought, the Italian Renaissance. Mr.Wells gives us a few inadequate pages of outline, and then we abandon ourselves, for seven spacious and astounding volumes, to the lead of John Addington Symonds, who took the very breath of his ailing life, and even the latitude of his morals, from this greatest epoch of the Christian age. (If your years are too short for so extended a tour, read Burckhardt’s single volume, The Renaissance in Italy; if you have learned to make haste slowly, read Burckhardt and Symonds, too.) Here again is a very swarm of genius: at Florence we enter the Palace of the Medici, where Pico della Mirandola is burning candles before the bust of the rediscovered Plato, and a boy called Michelangelo is carving the figure of a toothless faun; at Rome we walk the marble floors of the Vatican with Julius II and Leo X, and watch them turning the wealth and poetry of the Church to the stimulation and nourishment of every art.Vasari opens to us the studios of Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Raphael, and Angelo; Faure rhapsodizes on this unprecedented efflorescence of painting, statuary, and ornament; Machiavelli makes Caesar Borgia sit for the portrait of the ideal prince; Cellini abandons murder occasionally to cast his Perseus or make a perfect vase; Bruno and Vanini renew man’s effort to understand the world with reason; Copernicus, Vesalius, and Gilbert lay the cornerstones of modern science; and Palestrina takes us aloft on the wings of song.A supreme era unfolds itself for us in every phase of its winnowed wealth.

But Luther, coming down from the cold, stern North, does not like the licentious art of sunny Italy, and in a voice heard throughout the world he calls for the return of the Church to primitive asceticism and simplicity. The princes of Germany, using the religious revolt as an instrument of policy, separate their growing realms from the Papacy, establish a multitude of independent states, and inaugurate that dynastic nationalism which is the thread of European history from the Reformation to the Revolution. National consciousness replaces religious conscience, patriotism replaces piety, and every European people has for a century its own Renaissance. It is an age of political romance: Catherine de Medici and Henry VIII, Charles V and Philip of the Armada, Elizabeth and Essex, Mary Queen of Scots and her inextricable lovers, and the Terrible Ivan. It is an epoch of giants in literature: in France Rabelais riots with all commandments and adjectives, and Montaigne discusses affairs public and privy in the greatest essays ever written; in Spain Cervantes finds one arm sufficient for writing the most famous of all novels, and Lope de Vega composes eighteen hundred plays; in London a butcher’s son produces the greatest of modern dramas, and all England, as Spengler would say, is “in form.” It is the springtime of the modern soul.

Scholars are wont to say that after that brilliant coming-of-age in Spain, England, and France, Europe suffered a setback, and fell from the high level of the Renaissance. In a sense it is true: the seventeenth century is an epoch of religious conflict, the period of that Thirty Years’War which ruined Germany, and that Puritan Revolution which put an end for a century to the poetic and artistic exuberance of England. But even so consider the roster of that century. It is the time of the Three Musketeers: Richelieu and Mazarin strengthen the central government of France against the feudal barons, and bequeath a united and powerful state to Louis XIV as an organized medium of security and order for the fine flower of French culture under Voltaire. La Rochefoucauld gives finished form to the cynicism of theaters and courts; Molière fights with ridicule the hypocrisies and conceits of his people, and Pascal mingles, in passionate rhetoric, mathematics and piety. Bacon and Milton raise English prose to its highest reach, and Milton writes, in addition, some tolerable verse. It is an era of mighty systems in philosophy: Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke in England; Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz on the Continent. In science it is the age of Galileo in astronomy, of Sir William Harvey in physiology, of Robert Boyle in chemistry, of Isaac Newton in everything. In painting it is a shower of stars: in Holland, Rembrandt and Franz Hals; in Flanders, Rubens and Van Dyke; in France, Poussin and Claude Lorrain; in Spain, El Greco and Velázquez. And in music, Bach is born.