United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Sebastiano, apparently in good faith, made the following burlesque suggestion: "For myself, I think that the Ganymede would go there very well; one could put an aureole about him, and turn him into a S. John of the Apocalypse when he is being caught up into the heavens." The whole of one side of the Italian Renaissance, its so-called neo-paganism, is contained in this remark.
Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill, is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's.
To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It is the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we referred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember, is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law unto himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole universe.
What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Renaissance its frivolity and worldliness, corroding the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their sensuous existence had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari and Luini worked.
It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a cry of "Neo-paganism," and various attempts at persecution. The author of the book was quite unmoved.
For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.
As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne's reign quite a different thing from the "Neo-paganism" which now causes so much anxiety to the moral press-man let us note the affecting instance of Geffery Ammon. "He was a merry companion, and his conversation was much courted." Geffery had but little sense of religion. He is now buried on the west side of Binsey churchyard, near St. Margaret's well.
But although this Neo-paganism appealed more to the passions of men than the sunny humanistic worship of older times, and for a time inspired the most frenzied enthusiasm, it failed utterly to resuscitate the decaying corpse of the old religion. Great Pan was hopelessly dead! At a short distance on the same side of the road is the Catacomb of Sts.
This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages, from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and poised man himself in a sure equilibrium.
The capacity for perceiving and for reproducing what is nobly beautiful was lost. Vulgarity and coarseness stamped themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio Romano. At this crisis it was proved how inferior was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century to the paganism of antiquity it aped.
Word Of The Day