"Renaissance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... took up a book, or examined the cunning spring of a sixteenth-century dagger, or turned to the dripping panes. He would have been content even to sit and listen to Mr. White sententiously lecturing Lady Macleod about the Renaissance, knowing that from time to time those beautiful, tender eyes would meet his. But what would she think of it? Would she consider this the normal condition of life in the Highlands—this being boxed up in an old-fashioned room, with doors and windows firmly closed against the ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... thirty years since in Southern Europe, England, and America, a genuine Renaissance of Vedic literature, philosophy, and religion began to assume a popular form and to become accessible ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... illuminated and ornamented in the style of the Missals of the Renaissance by H. N. HUMPHREYS. Square fcp. 8vo. 21s. in massive carved covers; or 30s. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... the sixteenth century has been traced by the antiquaries as far back as the time of Edward III. But in its perfected shape it was a genuine offspring of the English renaissance, a cross between the vernacular mummery, or mystery-play, and the Greek drama. No great court festival was considered complete without such a public show. Many of our great dramatic writers, Beaumont, Fletcher, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... in astonishing number and variety. As the spirit of the Renaissance began to inspire England, translators responded to its stimulus with an enthusiasm denied to later times. It was work that appealed to persons of varying ranks and of varying degrees of learning. ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... epoch of the world's progress shows the supreme importance of speech upon human action—individual and collective. In the Roman Forum were made speeches that affected the entire ancient world. Renaissance Italy, imperial Spain, unwieldy Russia, freedom-loving England, revolutionary France, all experienced periods when the power of certain men to speak stirred other ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... furniture, consisting of kitchen utensils, body and table linen, shirts and chemises, lace, petticoats, trousers, French and Indian cashmeres, an Erard piano, two Renaissance oak chests, Venetian mirrors, Chinese and ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... philosophic writer, Jordano Bruno, who lived about the same time as Galileo, and was born at Nole in 1550, being fourteen years his senior. At an early age he acquired a great love of study and a thirst for knowledge. The Renaissance and the revival of learning had opened wide the gates of knowledge, and there were many eager faces crowding around the doors, many longing to enter the fair Paradise and explore the far-extending vistas which met their gaze. It was an age of anxious and eager inquiry; the torpor of the last ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... austerer and purer life, free from taint of sin and regret. We shall then put in the first group such well-known seers and poets as Epicurus, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman; we shall think of the Greek gods, of the Renaissance artists, the English cavaliers. We shall think of the motto, "Carpe diem," and "Gather ye rosebuds while ye ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself in useless ornament and wanton brutality, the more delicate crafts had no hope of exercise. Even the adventurer upon the road threatened his victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the breath of the Renaissance had vivified the world that a gentleman and an artist could face the traveller with a courteous demand for his purse. But the age which witnessed the enterprise of Drake and the triumph of Shakespeare knew also the prowess of the highwayman and the dexterity of the cutpurse. Though the art displayed ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... were critical times. There wasn't material and energy to spare for irrelevant details. No doubt when complete peace was achieved there would be a renaissance. Meanwhile he, Lancaster, had his Euripides and Goethe and whatever else he liked, or knew where ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... joke on the college. Katharine's secret joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers. Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the ocean of ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... where so many people are confined throughout the day in work-shops and studios, a breathing-space becomes a necessity. The gardens of the Luxembourg, brilliant in flowers and laid out in the Renaissance, with shady groves and long avenues of chestnut-trees stretching up to the Place de l'Observatoire, afford the great breathing-ground ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... away, had here in Rome formed a learned school based on the antique; Lessing, in his treatise, the 'Laocoon,' and Winckelmann, by his criticisms on the marbles of the Vatican, had induced a new Classic Renaissance. The painter Raphael Mengs, thus guided, appropriately executed in the Villa Albani the famous fresco of Apollo and the Nine Muses on Mount Parnassus. Again, here are men and manifestations not to ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... from time to time, old grammatical forms die away or become obliterated, new names and verbs are borrowed, first from the Norman-French at the Conquest, then from the classical Greek and Latin at the Renaissance; but the continuity of the language remains unbroken, and its substance is still essentially the same as at the beginning. The Cornish, the Irish, and to some extent the Welsh, have left off speaking their native tongues, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... in the New Renaissance—yes. In the Deluge that shall engulf the world, his place is in the Ark. I ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... any immediate prospect of their ever doing so? Did the Greeks, who attained the supreme heights in art, find happiness in their art? Their history is the record of one long struggle; and so it was with the renaissance of the Middle Ages, and so it is with us; our sciences and arts can never change the complicated conditions in which we live. They have never developed the sympathy and brotherly love which should exist between man and man; ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... made the 'petty tour' with his father, mother, and Winifred—Brussels, the Rhine, Switzerland, and home by way of Paris. Aged twenty-seven, just when he began to take interest in pictures, he had spent five hot weeks in Italy, looking into the Renaissance—not so much in it as he had been led to expect—and a fortnight in Paris on his way back, looking into himself, as became a Forsyte surrounded by people so strongly self-centred and 'foreign' as the French. His knowledge of their language being ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Period of the Renaissance in Italy. Authorized translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore. 2 vols. Demy ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... they had conquered construction, took to imposing ornament. From that time, instead of ornamenting construction, they constructed ornament; and as the Reformation came to the Church in the sixteenth century so to architecture came degradation. And then the Renaissance of pagan types, from which the Gothic had derived its being by a rational development, was by the revivalists of those days hotch-potched into a more or less homogeneous mass, which even the genius of Wren could leave ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the erection at Anizy of a new chateau, to be surrounded with an extensive and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to decorate the facade with statues—the new buildings were connected with what remained of the earlier chateau by a grand gallery; pavilions flanked the main edifice and adorned the grand ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... interpretation of transition periods given by scientific evolutionism. They did not annihilate the conquests of the preceding civilizations, but they preserved, on the contrary, whatever was vital in them and fecundated them for the Renaissance of a new civilization. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... is, perhaps, the most curious jumble in the whole history of architecture,—the lower stories being Palladian; the stories above these being, if anything, Florentine; the summit being, if anything, French Renaissance; while, as regards the interior, the great west staircase, which is said to have cost half a million of dollars, is in the Richardsonesque style; the eastern staircase is in classic style; and a circular staircase in the interior is in the most flamboyant Gothic which ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... books of quotable passages, so called because an Italian grammarian, Marius Nizolius, born at Bersello in the fifteenth century, and one of the scholars of the Renaissance in the sixteenth, was one of the first producers of such volumes. His contribution was an alphabetical folio dictionary of phrases from Cicero: "Thesaurus Ciceronianus, sive Apparatus Linguae Latinae e ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... and Mary Howitt are inextricably associated with the England of the early nineteenth century, with the re-discovery of the beauty and interest of their native land, with the renaissance of the national passion for country pleasures and country pursuits, and with the slow, painful struggle for a wider freedom, a truer humanity, a fuller, more gracious life. The Howitts had no genius, nor were they pioneers, but, where the unfamiliar was concerned, they were open-minded ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... me or merely pulling my leg?" said Mr. Manley. "Surely you can see that Lady Loudwater is pure Italian Renaissance. She is one of those subtle, mysterious creatures that Leonardo and Luini were always painting, compact ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... already pretty clear to all who look for it honestly and without prejudice. The German Government believed that the Serbian propaganda would annihilate Austria-Hungary, and hoped, moreover, that her last faithful ally would experience a political renaissance as the result of her chastisement of Serbia. That is why they gave Count Berchtold a free hand, in the belief that Count Buelow's success over the Bosnian crisis could be repeated. Meanwhile, however, the situation had changed. Russia and France, relying upon ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... phase (Antiquity, Renaissance) when triumphed the pure imagination, and the play of the free fancy that spends itself in social novels. Between the creation of the mind and the life of contemporary society there was no relation; they were worlds apart, strangers to one another. The ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... is with especial reference to the denial of this principle in modern and Renaissance architecture, that I speak of that architecture with a bitterness which appears to many readers extreme, while in reality, so far from exaggerating, I have not grasp enough of thought to embrace, the evils which have resulted among all the orders of European society from the introduction ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... exquisite finish, which pleases me beyond measure. Your Rubens are also to my taste, as well as your smallest Watteau. In the salon to the right, I have noticed the Louis XIII cadence-table, the tapestries of Beauvais, the Empire gueridon signed 'Jacob,' and the Renaissance chest. In the salon to the left, all the cabinet full ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... the line of the Lunas till it became misty and was lost in the fifteenth century. His father had known Don Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger branches to the church had made him a cardinal ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... threefold. It is the work of a writer intelligently familiar with the Greek and Roman classics, and it thus stands beside Elyot's Governour, which appeared two years before, as one of the earliest illustrations of the influence of the Renaissance on our vernacular literature. It is one of the earliest examples, not only of the employment of the English language in the treatment of scholastic subjects, but of the vindication of the use of English in the treatment of such subjects; and, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the world's poets lived in a period midway between the highest development of Renaissance civilization and the foundation of our modern civilization, and he was thus at once heir to the rich treasures of a glorious past, and endowed with a poetic, or we might say a prophetic insight that makes his works appeal as closely to the readers of to-day as to those ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... suffused with a certain hue of courtliness, even gentleness. The language is of the most refined delicacy, the thought is never boorish or rude; there is the self-collectedness which we find in the poetry of France and Italy during the Renaissance, and in England during the reign of Queen Anne. It exhibits the most exquisite polish, allied with an avoidance of every shocking or perturbing theme. It seems to combine the enduring lustre of a precious metal with the tenuity ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... history of civilization is a history of the famous gathering-places of men. The story of human progress in the West is the story of Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Cnossus, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, and of medieval, Renaissance, and modern capitals. History is a stream, in the remoter antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia confined within narrow and comparatively definite banks, gathering in volume and swiftness as it flows through Hellenic lands, and at last expanding into the broad and deep basin of ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... yawns; but he bore with the Romantics with a patience hardly to be expected of a man of the Imperial school, who scarcely could make out what the young writers meant. Not so Mme. de Bargeton; she waxed enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the return of the Bourbon Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling Victor Hugo "a sublime child." It depressed her that she could only know genius from afar, she sighed for Paris, where great ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... realize how, in spite of the tragic stories or bloodshed and strife that darkened their lives, in spite, too, of the low standard of morals and of the crimes and vices that we are accustomed to associate with Renaissance princes, there was a rare measure of beauty and goodness, of culture and refinement, of love of justice and zeal for truth, among them. As the latest historian of the Papacy, Dr. Pastor, has wisely remarked, we must take care not to paint the state of morals during ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... and I care not who makes her laws." The importance of singing is recognized to a much greater extent in foreign countries, notably in Germany, than in America. In Germany all sing; in America, it is to be regretted, but few sing. There should be a real renaissance in music throughout the country. As an aid in the teaching of music and of song, that marvelous invention, the "talking machine," should be made use of. It would be an excellent thing if a phonograph could be put in every school. Children would become acquainted with the best music; they ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Elizabeth the old Middle Temple Hall was converted into chambers, and a new hall built. The present roof (says Mr. Peter Cunningham) is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London. The screen, in the Renaissance style, was long supposed to be an exact copy of the Strand front of Old Somerset House; but this is a vulgar error; nor could it have been made of timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... could take a stranger to admire the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... the world has progressed as do the processes of the kindergarten. Artists first received form; then color; the materials, then the synthesis of the two. Notable examples of the world's great compositions may be pointed to in the work of the Renaissance painters, and such examples will be cited; but the major portion of the art by which these exceptions were surrounded offers the same proportion of good to bad as the inverse ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... was assuredly winging its flight, but it would not come till the Church was almost in extremis; till decay of faith following on decay of morals threatened her very existence. The catastrophe was hastened by the fatal pouring of the new wine of the later Renaissance into the old, now worn-out bottles of Mediaevalism, thereby paganising Rome and corrupting the College of Cardinals to so large an extent, that the election to the papacy of a Rodrigo Borgia was ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... he has been bolstering up the eventual Renaissance. Your father and his kind have kept the seed alive; we shall bring it ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... of St. Pierre, dating from the fifteenth century, a very noble building, with many chapels filled with carvings of the time of the Renaissance in wood, stone, and iron. In the university were one ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... of the Renaissance, as Hadria afterwards called the short-lived epoch, little Martha was visited frequently. Her protectress had expected to have to do battle with hereditary weakness on account of her mother's sufferings, but the child shewed no signs of this. Either ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... out problems of form and in delicacy and charm of expression he went beyond his predecessors. He was a many-sided genius, knowing not only in a matter of natural appearance, but in color problems, in perspective, shadows, and light. His art was further along toward the Renaissance than that of any other Giottesque. He almost changed the character of painting, and yet did not live near enough to the fifteenth century to accomplish it completely. Spinello Aretino (1332?-1410?) was the last of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... group seemed to lack flamboyancy. It is true, however, that, except for Guilder's habitual restraint, the celebrated firm of architects was inclined to express themselves flamboyantly, and to interpret Renaissance in terms of Baroque. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... the grands rhtoriqueurs like MESCHINOT (1415?-1491), or MOLINET (d. 1507), the recognized leader of his day. The last expiring effort of this essentially mediaeval lyric is seen in CLMENT MAROT. He had already begun to catch the glow of the dawn of the Renaissance, but he was rooted in the soil of the middle ages and his real masters were his immediate predecessors. He avoided their absurdities of alliteration and redundant rhyme and their pedantry; but he appropriated the results of their efforts ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... window on the left was set a great carved Renaissance writing-table, and upon it burned an electric lamp with an artistic shade ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... giving them selected data to work upon. A directive idea may be suggested by a series of ideas which lead the recipient of them to expect that the series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was overwhelmingly ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... but on level with the rest and | delivered the following address... | (III, 559; Farrington's translation). | | Bacon's portrait doubtless resembles | Galileo or Einstein more than it does | the turbulent Paracelsus or the | unquiet and skittish Cornelius | Agrippa. The titanic bearing of the | Renaissance magus is now supplanted | by a classical composure similar to | that of the "conversations" of the | earliest Humanists. Also in Galileo's | DIALOGO and in Descartes's RECHERCHE | DE LA VERIT we find the same | familiar tone and style ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-work rose window, pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it a ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... principal design, and the portraits of Henry the Seventh and his consort Elizabeth in separate compartments beneath, each kneeling before a faldstool, may be noticed. This window, which in some of the details exhibits an approach to the renaissance style, was presented to Henry the Seventh by the magistrates of Dort in Holland, to adorn his chapel at Westminster. The era of the various specimens of ancient stained glass we meet with in our churches ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... paper so soon as I am done with this story, that has played me out; the story is to be called When the Devil was well: scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander nor step aside, but go ever before its face, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thing I know quite well, though, is unchanging," she continued, her face losing all the gentle softness which a moment before he had found so fascinating, so reminiscent of those sad, sleepy-eyed women immortalised by the masters of the Renaissance. "That is my hatred of everything and everybody connected ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the day. There was a holy joy in the air. The neighbors, up earlier than usual, hung cloths with flowers or figures, worked in tapestry, along the streets. I went from one to another, by turns admiring religious scenes of the Middle Ages, mythological compositions of the Renaissance, old battles in the style of Louis XIV, and the Arcadias of Madame de Pompadour. All this world of phantoms seemed to be coming forth from the dust of past ages, to assist—silent and motionless—at the holy ceremony. I looked, alternately ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... own National Gallery. It is quaint and imperfect, but of great interest." [Ruskin.] Paolo Uccello (c. 1397-1475), a Florentine painter of the Renaissance, the first of the naturalists. His real name was Paolo di Dono, but he was called Uccello ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults, and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very building itself, and sustaining it—not like the Greek caryatid, without effort—nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or impossible effort—but as if all that was silent and stern, and withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... in satire so keen, a contempt so bitter, a hatred so remorseless, that it was difficult to believe it a letter from a brother to his sister. Beneath the polished, scornful sentences—vitriol to a tender young heart—surged a tempest of primitive rage that thrust one back into the Renaissance, with its daggers and its smiles. "Let me tell you, then, once and for all," ran one sentence, breaking out fiercely, "that there is but one country on earth which can shelter you and that villain—his own! There I scorn to put my foot or allow the foot of any member of your family, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... thought is shown by the fact that he founded no school and left no trace of discipleship. The entire century after his death shows no single European name that need claim the attention of the historian of science. In the latter part of the fifteenth century, however, there is evidence of a renaissance of science no less than of art. The German Muller became famous under the latinized named of Regio Montanus (1437-1472), although his actual scientific attainments would appear to have been important only in comparison with ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Material on the subject of travel in any century is apparently inexhaustible, and one could write many books on the subject without duplicating sources. The following aims no further than to describe one phase of Renaissance travel in clear and sharp outline, with sufficient illustration to embellish but not ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... of the second volume of my 'Renaissance in Italy' I indulged the hope that I might live to describe the phase of culture which closed that brilliant epoch. It was in truth demanded that a work pretending to display the manifold activity of the Italian genius during the 15th ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... yearn to be at home in poor Warwick Crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new abode. I forget you don't know Venice. Well then, the Palazzo Manzoni is situate on the Grand Canal, and is described by Ruskin,—to give no other authority,—as 'a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.' And again—'an exquisite example (of Byzantine Renaissance) as applied to domestic architecture.' So testify the 'Stones of Venice'. But we will talk about the place, over a photograph, when I am happy enough ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista Alberti in 1450. This strange church, one of the earliest extant buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their interiors rich with black and white tiling ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the best authorities now remaining) the peculiar features, and general characteristics of Decorative Art, as applied to the various materials on which it was employed, whether for sacred or domestic purposes, from the Byzantine, or early Christian period, to the decline of that termed the Renaissance. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared Jittle for the crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the early Flemings,—the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and Tintorets you ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... setting down his bag and leaning a green umbrella against it, "has its surprises even at sixty-two. Last night I was ensconced by my own library fire, preparing a paper on the Pagan Renaissance. To-night I am on Baldpate Mountain, with a perforation in ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... spirit had by this time penetrated literature, and any poetry wholly divorced from it must be not only artificial—for that alone would prove nothing against it—but unnatural. Claudian is a precursor of the Renaissance in its narrower aspect; the last of the classics, he is at the same time the earliest, and one of the most distinguished, of the classicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... proudly. "Built every inch of it from the busy little ptomaines. Coral insects nothing on that, eh? And here's the sort of people I practice on. Old Leathersham, now—he has a corking chateau—French Renaissance. And Mrs. Charity Givens—she has a Georgian shack. And, oh, yes, here's Iva Payne. She's one of my most ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... Lightning said. "The world is at the beginning of a new cultural revolution. Since the Cold War melted, and freedom of inquiry and research began to live again on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, science has begun a new Renaissance. The cultural ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris
... the house with screens or light partitions instead of walls lent itself to a style of decoration which was quite as different in its exigencies and character from Occidental mural decorations as was Japanese architecture from Gothic or Renaissance. The first native school of decorative artists was the Yamato-ryu, founded in the eleventh century by Fujiwara Motomitsu and reaching the height of its powers in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century Fujiwara Tsunetaka, a great painter of this school, took ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the most extraordinary specimen hitherto produced in England of the licence introduced from Italy at the Renaissance. Although the poem was successful, it did not pass without censure from the moral point of view. Into the conventional outlines of The Affectionate Shepherd the young poet has poured all his fancy, all ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... beards cut as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the Gothic, the taste of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own—a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... History starts with the end of the fifteenth century, with the invention of printing, the discovery of America and of the Indies, the Renaissance of the sciences and arts. It concerns itself especially with peoples of the West, of Spain, Italy, France, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... Pinkerton laid down: why the artist can DO NOTHING ELSE? is one that continually exercises myself. He cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can't R. L. S.? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think DAVID BALFOUR a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dying Bishop is as great a masterpiece as My Last Duchess; it has not a superfluous word, and in only a few lines gives us the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Ruskin said that Browning is "unerring in every sentence he writes about the Middle Ages, always vital, right, and profound." He added, "I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the Great (B.C. 323) a Greek dynasty, that of the Ptolemies, established itself at Alexandria, and another Greek dynasty at Pergamon. Both were distinguished—like Italian despots of the Renaissance—for the splendour and the culture of their courts, and they rivalled one another in the extent and richness of their libraries; but, if we are to believe Strabo, the library at Pergamon was not begun until the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... of Spenser and of Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of Woman, her wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not "in the air" in 1847. To be sure it had often been "in the air." The Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution had begotten ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Faenza Ware, from the pencils of Robbia and Bernard Palizzi; Glass, of the rarest hues and tints, executed by Jean Cousin and other masters of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries; Limoges enamels of the period of the Renaissance, by Leonard and Courtoise; Roman and Greek antiquities in bronze and sculpture; Oriental and European china, of the choicest forms and colours; exquisite and matchless Missals, painted by Raphael and Julio Clovo; magnificent specimens of Cinque-Cento Armour; Miniatures, illustrative of ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... remains of Leonardo da Vinci, who was summoned to Amboise by Francis I., king of France, and died there in 1519, is in the late Gothic style; a delicately carved relief over the doorway represents the conversion of St Hubert. The hotel de ville is established in a mansion of Renaissance architecture; a town gateway of the 15th century, surmounted by a belfry, is also of architectural interest. Iron-founding, wool-weaving, and the manufacture of boots and farm implements are ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... or two. The belvedere was lingeringly reminiscent of the vanishing classic, and the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint traces of the romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years between the ebb of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of Second-empire renaissance. Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous old homestead, fit for ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... of the Jews in Italy was favorable, and their literary products derive grace from their good fortune. The Renaissance had a benign effect upon them, and the revival of classical studies influenced their intellectual work. Greek thought met Jewish a third time. Learning was enjoying its resurrection, and whenever their wretched ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... had not been a cultivator of mechanical philosophy until Leonardo da Vinci, who was born A.D. 1452. To him, and not to Lord Bacon, must be attributed the renaissance of science. Bacon was not only ignorant of mathematics, but depreciated its application to physical inquiries. He contemptuously rejected the Copernican system, alleging absurd objections to it. While Galileo was on the brink of his great telescopic discoveries, Bacon was publishing doubts as to ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... lions' heads. But Madame Gerard, in her kitchen, where she was always cooking something good for dinner, sometimes thought they made too great an uproar. Then Maria, a real hoyden, in trying to catch her sister, would push an old armchair against a Renaissance chest and make all the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... gem of the Renaissance, and you will love it as I do, I know, but I wish you could have seen Florence first. My brother has a villa at Settignano and I am going there now. The fruit trees in the orchard will be all white with blossom. You remember Romeo's April oath: 'By yonder ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... that all the liberties, reforms and political achievements of society have been gained by nations thrilling and throbbing to one great enthusiasm. The Renaissance does not mean a single Dante, nor Boccaccio, but a national enthusiasm and a "god within all minds." The Reformation is not a single Savonarola, nor Luther, but a universal enthusiasm and "a god within," all heart and conscience. If ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Michael Angelo and the unrivalled museums of the Vatican, that Rome should have become pre-eminently the artistic centre of the nineteenth century and should have attracted students and lovers of art from all parts of the world. The immortal works of the two great periods, the Greek and the Renaissance,—the art that was forever great because it was the outgrowth of profound religious conviction,—were enshrined in the churches and the galleries of Rome. The leading countries of Europe sent here their aspiring students and established ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... seen that in this renaissance the keenest students of the exquisite were women. Nevertheless, men were not idle, neither. Since the day of Mr. Brummell and King George, the noble art of self-adornment had fallen partially desuete. Great fops ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... and Petrarch in this Discourse, in tracing the history of Italian Art during the centuries of transition: "With Dante we reach the threshold of the Renaissance. He stands on the verge of the middle ages; in him the old order ends. With Petrarch the new order begins." It is not so much as a poet, however, that Petrarch counts in this process from one period to another; but rather as an intellectual pioneer, leading the way into the great pagan ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... having soon made the poem intolerable to him (vol. i, page 300). Turner's paintings he finds untrue, in that the earth-region is habitually as bright in tone as the air-region. Moreover, Turner scatters his detail too evenly. In Greek statues the hair is falsely treated. Renaissance painting, even the best, is spoiled by unreal illumination, and non-rendering of reflected light in the shadows. Venetian gothic sins by meaningless ornamentation. St. Mark's Church may be precious archaeologically, but is not aesthetically ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... proximity would be of any value. Cecily inclined towards London, feeling that there only would her husband find incentives to exertion; but Reuben was more disposed to settle somewhere on the Continent. He talked of going back to Italy, living in Florence, and—writing something new about the Renaissance. Cecily shook her head; Italy she loved, and she had seen nothing of it north of Naples, but it was the land of lotus-eaters. They would go there again, but not until life ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... the three great names of the noblest period of the Renaissance take our minds from the host of fine artists who worked alongside them. Nevertheless beside these giants a whole host of exquisite artists have place, and not least among them the three painters with whom Mr. Leader Scott has dealt in these pages. Fra Bartolommeo linking up with the ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... though any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this believe me it is but on account of the multitude and splendour of those who have attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it are copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must also mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... very well for that show of improvement which deepens the sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and decay in Latin towns. As for the cathedral, which faced the convent from across the Square, it was as cold and torpid a bit of Renaissance as could be found in Rome itself. A red-coated soldier or two passed through the Square; three or four neat little French policemen lounged about in blue uniforms and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced, blue-eyed old citizens and peasants ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Academie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third century, it was entirely superficial, and doubtless slightly factitious; it resembled that reaction in the life, the language, the traditions of the provinces which the French Romanticism brought about in 1815. Like that, it in no way changed ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... reason of its old fashion. She had a very sweet, kind face, all cockled with wrinkles like a sheet of crumpled tissue paper, but very beautiful in its age. It was a face that a modern French painter would have loved to paint—a face that a sculptor of the Renaissance would have delighted to reproduce in faithful, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... epileptics, enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom, the very types that we are compelled to suppose probable among the apostles and disciples of the early Christian era. Certainly no mind stands further removed from the Renaissance." ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... narrow political sect who believe that law is only a human edict supported by physical force,—this sect which had its origin in the dark decades of the nineteenth century when the materialistic philosophy prevailed—is dying out, under the influence of a general renaissance. There are, it is to be believed, many who will be ready and willing to accept as true the statement, which every student of political history must admit to be true, that the philosophy of the American Revolution was a religious philosophy. ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... training and study for its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance, and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the modern world to which the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... a pause. "Is there anything amusing about being loved?" she thought; "what patient women the great coquettes of the world must have been! How I wish I were a crisp intelligent old maid, with a talent perhaps for gardening or books on the Renaissance!" ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... study of mathematics, painting the while, and apparently aiming at a fusion of both pursuits. He subsequently read for the bar for a short time, and, finally, adopting art as his sole profession, threw himself heart and soul into a Renaissance movement as the apostle of a new style. The peculiarities of his manner soon brought him into notoriety, and a school of imitators grouped itself around him. His pride became a proverb. In 1870 he was offered the cross of the Legion of Honour, and refused it, arrogantly declaring that he would ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... Pater, "Leonardo da Vinci," in The Renaissance. | | For an account of scientific experiments on the time and | | stress rhythm of this sentence, see W. M. Patterson, The | | Rhythm of Prose, New York, 1916, ch. iv. An idea of the | | complexity may be obtained from Patterson's attempt to | | indicate it by musical ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Racine, surrounded by his brilliant circle of lords and ladies, represented an almost incalculable development of ceremonious culture, in idea, in apparel, and in general surroundings, since the day when, about a hundred years before, while the blossom of the Renaissance was barely expanded, the popinjay King Henry II looked on at the first crude sketch of a French classical play. Stage, scenery, appointments, audience, critic, music, actors, and authors, all now bore witness to and adorned, as they ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... almost obliterated the expression of creative energy in the Western World, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the industrial revolution, following in quick succession, proclaimed its reawakening, and to-day there is scarcely a group of people—in Egypt, in Ireland, in Korea, in the Philippines, or in dark, enslaved Africa that does not hold a ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... itself a champion of virtue. In other words, Washington addresses an audience which had passed through the Puritan Revolution, while Machiavelli spoke to men who were familiar with the ideals and crimes of the Italian Renaissance. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... from the belfry, I stopt in the yard before a handsome porch of the Renaissance, the second story of which is formed of a series of small triumphal arches, with inscriptions. The first is dedicated to Caesar; the second to Augustus; the third to Agrippa, the founder of Cologne; the fourth ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... It was doubtless this renaissance of mental activity that reminded us of the Kawa and of William Henry Thomas. Great heavens, what would he think of us? Here nearly a month had elapsed, we were mostly married and had never given him a thought. We were filled with compunction. ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... arts which lay at the base of exploration, as in so many other fields, Italy was far in advance of all other Western countries. Through the Middle Ages she preserved much of the heritage of ancient skill and learning; by her Renaissance studies she recovered much that had been temporarily lost; and in geographical science she early made progress of her own. "The greatness of the Germans, the courtesy of the French, the valor of the English, and the wisdom of the Italians" is the tribute paid by a fifteenth- century Portuguese ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... clerical specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles, secular poets of divines; ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... was no fear of that; indeed, he had no thought of the kind. Leaving the dangerous ground behind him, he glided easily and naturally into impersonal subjects. From Italy he began to talk of Florence, of Pico della Mirandola, and the painters of the Renaissance. He strove his utmost to interest her, and with his vast stock of acquired knowledge, and his wonderfully artistic felicity of expression, he talked on and on, wandering from country to country, and age to age, ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... affable mind, and a very happy disposition. Sprung from an excellent father, who, though of no great education, entered with real enthusiasm into the movement of the Renaissance and all the liberal novelties of his time, the son corrected the excessive enthusiasm, vivacity, and tenderness he inherited by a great refinement and justness of reflection; but he did not abjure the original groundwork. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... work of Goethe, without awakening to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which England had hitherto been dead. With all its shortcomings, the discovery of German literature was a greater revelation than any made to Europe since the classical Renaissance. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... all out by herself. When asked what she meant, she was smilingly vague, with a glance at Edith's youngsters. But she threw out hints about the church and even Christianity, as though it were falling to pieces. She spoke of a second Renaissance, "a glorious pagan era" coming. And then she exploded a little bomb by ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... canons of beauty, I wonder?" Matravers remarked. "I hold myself a very poor judge of woman's looks, but I can at least recognize the classical and Renaissance standards. The beauty which this woman possesses, if any, is of the decadent order. I do not recognize it. I cannot ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... King James version was made just after the literary renaissance, the classical learning of to-day is far in advance of that day. The King James version is occasionally defective in its use of tenses and verbs in the Greek and also in the Hebrew. We have Greek and Hebrew scholars who are able more exactly to ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the analogy which could not conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine advertisement of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such Renaissance magnificence. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... when this truthful history actually opens, as it had been when Sir Denzil's workmen set the last tier of bricks of the last twisted chimney-stack in its place. The grand, simple masses of the house—Gothic in its main lines, but with much of Renaissance work in its details—still lent themselves to the same broad effects of light and shadow, as it crowned the southern and western sloping hillside amid its red-walled gardens and pepper-pot summer-houses, its gleaming ponds and watercourses, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... rhetoric. For this reason, it should not be read as a reliable account of the Roman Civil War. However, as a work of poetic literature, it has few rivals; its powerful depiction of civil war and its consequences have haunted readers for centuries, and prompted many Medieval and Renaissance poets to regard Lucan among the ranks of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... courageous heart. The faint fragrance of her exquisite flesh clung to it still. He held it to his lips and kissed it. Then he stopped, to turn about and look upward at the tall hostelry behind him. High up below the renaissance cornice he beheld the lights glow forth in the rooms which he knew ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... poetry from the Renaissance onwards is second to none in richness of thought and beauty of diction, but it lacks the highest quality of all—universality of interest and appeal. Our poets have turned a cold shoulder to the activities and aims of the working ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... surface so many characteristic attributes of Mediaeval Gothic architecture as is to be observed in this land, extending from the Romanesque types of Frejus, Perigueux and Angouleme to that classical degeneration commonly called the Renaissance, a more offensive example of which could hardly be found than in the conglomerate structure of St. Etienne du Mont at Paris, or the more modern and, if possible, even more ugly Cathedral Churches at Arras, Cambrai, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun |
