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It was in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the renaissance eclogue, abandoning its last claims to poetic inspiration, assumed its definitive form in the works of Battista Spagnuoli, more commonly known from the place of his birth by the name of Mantuanus.
It therefore followed that during the age of the Renaissance any man of taste or genius, who desired to share the newly discovered privileges of learning, had to seek Italy. Every one who wished to be initiated into the secrets of science or philosophy, had to converse with Italians in person or through books.
Many remarkable specimens of German carving are to be met with in Augsburg, Aschaffenburg, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Gotha, Munich, Manheim, Nuremberg, Ulm, Regensburg, and other old German towns. Although made of steel, the celebrated chair at Longford Castle in Wiltshire is worthy of some notice as a remarkable specimen of German Renaissance.
The first, extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experiment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian Renaissance were produced within this short space of time.
Four boxes full of such fragments were sent to the Museum of S. Donato at Zara without any claim being made for expenses, but were refused. One ought not to omit mentioning the chapel of the Campo Santo, which has a strange façade with three great conventional shell forms above a rose-window, and a carved architrave with Renaissance motifs above the door.
Compilations such as the Itinerarium Italiæ of Schottus, published at Antwerp in 1600, and issued in eleven editions during the seventeenth century, had been sufficient for the accomplished traveller of the Renaissance.
But there is little at the present time at Argentan to remind one that it is in any way associated with the murder of Becket. The castle that now exists is occupied by the Courts of Justice and was partially built in the Renaissance period.
He had time to notice, however, the domed and decorated ceiling, the classical mantelpiece, with its medallions and its pillars of Sienese marble, a couple of bold Renaissance cabinets on either side, and a central table, resting on carved sphinxes, such as one might find in the sala of a Venetian palace.
To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the need of staff or crutch." This indeed is the glory of Italian as compared with Northern architecture.
Vandover found him in his room, a huge apartment, one side entirely taken up by book-shelves filled with works of fiction. The walls were covered with rough stone-blue paper, forming an admirable background to small plaster casts of Assyrian bas-reliefs and large photogravures of Renaissance portraits.
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