"Renaissance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a style of architecture in the Orient: The Temple of Omar at Jerusalem has it. The Taj Mahal has it. Interiors crusted with the color of gems and mosaics and rich inlay; the Italian renaissance has it; splashed from a palette that knew no stint—no economy. It's a brilliant, triumphant sort of paean in which the notes are all notes of color. You have it, too—and now I'm going to drive on. But don't forget that it's ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... idea of the half-pagan Christianity of the Renaissance very comforting, and do devout souls find consolation therein? The ambitious man, the rascal, the tyrant, the rake, all those haughty sinners who abuse life, and whom Death holds by the hair, are destined to be punished, without ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... improperly called, for the knowledge which it seeks is no more occult than any other—is it true that occultism is marking time, that it is becoming hopelessly entangled in the same doubtful facts and that it has not taken a single step forward since its renaissance more than fifty years ago? One must be entirely ignorant of the wonderful efforts of those fruitful years to venture upon such an assertion. This is not the place to discuss the question, which would require full and careful treatment; but ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... altars, military boundary-stones, amphorae, vases, capitals, and pottery, all found in the neighbourhood of Poitiers: a good deal of beautiful carving from the destroyed castle of Bonnivet, fine specimens of the Renaissance, and numerous relics of ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... rubbing his nose, "you are a member of 'The Encouragers of Egyptian Renaissance,' and 'The Teutonic Tombs Club,' and 'The Society for the Recovery of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... lower floor of the house, being naturally the heavier, can be curtained in a statelier manner than the lighter upper story. Here is the proper place for our handsome curtains of Irish point and other appliques of muslin or lace on net, and of scrim with insertions and edges of Renaissance, Cluny, and other laces. These curtains are manufactured in three shades—dark cream or ecru, light ivory, and pure white, the ivory being the richest and most desirable—and in simple, inexpensive designs ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... of 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 of ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... body, her aspect of long acquaintance with the very essence of materiality, became the ageless oracle, the rewarder of humanity's incorrigible credulity. So, like the bejeweled princesses in the Mesopotamian temples, the Latin ladies who had crept trembling into the Aventine caves, the Renaissance beauties who, in the huts of witches, had turned whiter than their ruffs, Lilla remained motionless, her gaze fixed apprehensively on ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... reawaken in the poetical imagination of the times the dormant memories of antiquity has not yet been told by the historians of literature. [Footnote: At least as far as England is concerned. For France, cf. Canat, La renaissance de la ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Eclogues: "AEglogai, as it were aigon or aigonomon logoi, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written a Latin Epic, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the best Englishmen that ever lived could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism in ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... brought into the town charabancs from neighbouring places loaded with passengers, many of whom joined the artistic residents, and you would have thought (until an inspection of their productions convinced you of the contrary) that some tremendous outburst of Art was rivalling the Italian Renaissance. For those who were capable of tackling straight lines and the intricacies of perspective there were the steep cobbled streets of charming and irregular architecture, while for those who rightly felt themselves ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... influence, comparable (comparable only) to Christianity, but it penetrated only the upper and middle classes of society in antiquity without descending, or barely descending, to the masses. Like Epicureanism, Stoicism had a renaissance in modern times in opposition to Christianity; this ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... the room and many loose papers on the desk, which Giles saw were manuscripts. "I write sometimes," said Franklin, smiling in his sour way. "It distracts my mind from worries. I am writing a history of Florence during the age of the Renaissance." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... 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 ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... eccentric of costumes, led indescribable farandoles to the sound of broken chairs and pistol shots, accompanied by Musard's orchestra, at these entertainments. There were balls in the Opera House, at the Renaissance, the Salle Ventadour, the Varietes—these last the prettiest and the most fashionable and amusing. Not an evening coat in the whole ball-room, everybody, men and women alike, in costume, and everybody acquainted with everybody else. And what gaiety and go there was about it all' You asked your ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... average club thought nothing of disposing of the works of the Victorian poets in one afternoon; the Italian Renaissance was "fully treated and most ably discussed," according to one programme, at a single meeting; Rembrandt and his school were likewise disposed of in one afternoon, and German literature was "adequately treated" at one ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... more widely known and studied from the beginning of the Italian Renaissance to the middle of the seventeenth century. In its style, however, it is far from classic. It is full of archaisms and rhetorical conceits. In striving to say things finely, the author frequently failed to say them well. This fault, however, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it is doubtful, sometimes it is entirely lost. More curious still, you often have for this period a mixture of names. You come across some astonishing series of reliefs in a forgotten church of a small provincial town. You know at once that it is work of the moment when the flood of the Renaissance had at last reached the old country of the Gothic. You can swear that if it were not made in the time of Francis I or Henry II it was at least made by men who could remember or had seen those times. But when you turn to the names the names ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Produce Exchange, one of the most impressive buildings in New York. It is of rich Italian Renaissance architecture. Beneath the projecting galley-prows in the main hall, the fierce bargaining of excited members reminded Mr. Searles of a pitched ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... its origin to the author's belief that Venetian painting is the most complete expression in art of the Italian Renaissance. The Renaissance is even more important typically than historically. Historically it may be looked upon as an age of glory or of shame according to the different views entertained of European events during the past five centuries. ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... the exhibit was completed. In the large room where the pharmacist met his customers, the shelves were filled with 15th-to 19th-century, European pharmaceutical antiques. These included Renaissance mortars; 16th-and 17th-century nested weights; beautiful Italian, French, Swiss, and German majolica and faience drug jars; Dutch and English delft; drug containers made of flint or opal glass with fused-enamel ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... building, standing between a courtyard and garden, is noticeable as a specimen of the style, both noble and elegant, of the reign of Louis XIII., coming singularly, as it did, between the bad taste of the expiring renaissance and the heavy grandeur of Louis XIV., at its dawn. This transition period is shown in many public buildings. The massive scroll-work of several facades—that of the Sorbonne, for instance,—and columns rectified according to the rules of Grecian art, were beginning ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... leaders: note - legal parties include: National Progressive Front or NPF [President Bashar al-ASAD, Dr. Suleiman QADDAH, deputy] (includes Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'th) Party [President Bashar al-ASAD, secretary; Muhammad BAKHITAN, assistant secretary general]; Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'th) Party [President Bashar al-ASAD, secretary general; Muhammad BAKHITAN, assistant secretary general]; Socialist Unionist Democratic Party [Fadlallah Nasr Al-DIN]; ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... transept; beside which was a magnificent creche—the figures half life-size, beautifully modelled, and richly clothed. But there was nothing whimsical about this creche: the group might have been, and very possibly had been, composed after a well-painted "Nativity" by some artist of the late Renaissance. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... when the Outsiders were on Earth," Rynason said. "Sometime after we'd started our own rise, certainly. Maybe in ancient Mesopotamia, or India. Or later, during the Renaissance?" ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... this, which has a lasting value, and appeals to the modern world as it appealed to Elizabethan England. Through the smoke of 'frantic boast and foolish word' may be discerned the fiery core of an idealized human grandeur. Breathing the intoxicating air of the Renaissance, Marlowe conceives man equal to his loftiest ideals, able to climb to the highest point of his thoughts. Choosing imperial conquest as the most striking theme he bids the shepherd aim at a throne, then bears him on the wings of unwavering resolution straight to his goal. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... is to say, the time of the beginning of the Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque interest; although what interest could be taken by any healthy ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... possessed a theatre—a really fine edifice, in truth—the interior and exterior arrangement of which combined every style of architecture. It was at once Byzantine, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, with semicircular doors, Pointed windows, Flamboyant rose-windows, fantastic bell-turrets,—in a word, a specimen of all sorts, half a Parthenon, half a Parisian Grand Cafe. Nor was this surprising, the theatre having been commenced under the burgomaster Ludwig Van Tricasse, in ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... immense debt to Italy, and, in both, the Italian influence took a similar form, modified on the one hand by humanism, and on the other by feelings of patriotism, if not of imperialism. Spain and England took the Renaissance fever more coldly, and at the same time more seriously, than did Italy. And in both the new movement eventually assumed the character of intellectual asceticism moulded by the sombre hand of religious fanaticism; ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... classical mythology without any apparent sense of incongruity. They mix heathen deities with Christian saints, and the ancient heroes adopt the manners of chivalrous romance without the slightest difficulty. The freedom was still granted to the writers of the renaissance. Milton makes Phoebus and St. Peter discourse in successive stanzas, as if they belonged to the same pantheon. For poetical purposes the old gods are simply canonized as Christian saints, as, in a more theological frame of mind, they are regarded as devils. In ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... did help precipitate a basic change in his life. At the age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than all the sculptures of Torrigiano ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... certainly does possess a very keen sense of fact, as well as dramatic power and great charm of style ... one of the finest comedies of the dramatic renaissance ... sustained dramatic power.... These peasants are poets, as certainly they are humorists, without knowing it. Certain passages of 'The Playboy' read like parts of the English Bible. There is the same direct and ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... practically unavoidable, in the gathering together of which I have been indebted to many authors: notably Vasari, Symonds, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Ruskin, Pater, and Baedeker. Among more recent books I would mention Herr Bode's "Florentine Sculptors of the Renaissance," Mr. F.M. Hyett's "Florence," Mr. E.L.S. Horsburgh's "Lorenzo the Magnificent" and "Savonarola," Mr. Gerald S. Davies' "Michelangelo," Mr. W.G. Waters' "Italian Sculptors," and Col. Young's ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... period between the days of chivalry and the dawn of the Renaissance, Bohemia continued to stroll along all the highways of the kingdom, and already to some extent about the streets of Paris. There is Master Pierre Gringoire, friend of the vagrants and foe to fasting. Lean and famished as a man whose very existence is one long Lent, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... 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 ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... Florentine, ivory statuette attributed to Michael Angelo, representing Pan discovering a woman under the skin of a young shepherd, the original of which is in the royal palace of Vienna. On either side were candelabra of Renaissance design. A clock, by Boule, on a tortoise-shell stand, inlaid with brass, sparkled in the centre of one panel between two statuettes, undoubtedly obtained from the demolition of some abbey. In the corners of the room, on pedestals, were lamps of royal magnificence, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... 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 were in fact the most elaborate product ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... different circumstances to the sermons of Rough, addressed to the slayers of the Cardinal, and to the calling of Knox himself, a crisis of popular emotion and vehement feeling. Such a man as Major, a son of the Renaissance, no Reformer nor careful of any of these things, must have looked on with strange feelings at all the revolutions accomplished before him, the rude jests and songs, the half-jocular broadly humorous assaults, the cry of heresy, the horror of the burnings, the deadly ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... were meant to hold their own against a color-scheme so strong as his. In conversation La Farge's mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... restrictions, be changed for 'trochees,' and out of these two 'feet,' or their representatives, a metre, certainly very beautiful, has grown up gradually, which attained perhaps its greatest perfection in the verse of Pope. But the poets of this metre, like renaissance architects, lost all perception of the laws of the original artists, and set themselves, whenever it was possible, to convert the original verses into such as their own system would have produced. We see the beginnings of this practice ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... real progress in color education must come not from a blind imitation of past successes, but by a study into the laws which they exemplify. To exactly copy fine Japanese prints or Persian rugs or Renaissance tapestries, while it cultivates an appreciation of their refinements, does not give one the power to create things equally beautiful. The masterpieces of music correctly rendered do not of necessity make a composer. The musician, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... Aristotle maintained their credit, their influence being greatest in the fourteenth century, when his doctrines were openly professed. After the invention of printing, they appeared in numberless editions,—several times in connection with the text of Aristotle. As the age of the Renaissance and of Protestantism approached, they gradually lost their prestige. The chief humanists, like Petrarch, as well as the chief reformers, were bitterly hostile to them. Nevertheless, they contributed important elements to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... a measure of truth in this," admitted Alexander the Sixth, "and the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was my felicity to be a Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation! when men's view of life was large and liberal; when the fair humanities flourished; when the earth yielded up her hoards of chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and new-found agate urns as fresh as day; when painters and sculptors vied ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... poets derided the wrinkles of Diane de Poitiers at the very moment when King Henry II idealized her with the homage of a Don Quixote; an atmosphere of physical beauty and decay hangs about the whole Renaissance. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... others wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The messages of the Bible are the loftiest in the range of human thought. There have been many magnificent periods like the age of Elizabeth, the time of the Renaissance and the age of Victoria, but no other single century has ever done anything equal to the production of the New Testament in the first century. The Bible has a sound psychology. It seeks to influence the whole man. ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... nascency, genesis; extraction, lineage; (new birth) regeneration, renaissance, regenesis, palingenesis. Associated Words: natal, native, pre-natal, post-natal, ante-natal, abortion, congenital, connate, connascent, connascence, horoscope, genial, genethliac, genethlialogy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the Germans came, Dives had a lovely chateau, part of it very old, with a round turret under a tall pointed hat; the other part comparatively young—as young as the Renaissance—and all built of that pale, rose-pink colour which most chateaux of this forestland, and this Ile-de-France used to wear in happy days before they put ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. None of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here. The people in these towns are peasants—and look it. They are the peasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of the Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Along the dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules tandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart's approach. The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The mules took their ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Corderius's Colloquia, and so on, for boys were taught to SPEAK Latin, the common language of the educated in Europe. Waifs of the Armada, Spaniards wrecked on the Irish coast, met "a savage who knew Latin," and thus could converse with him. The Eclogues of Mantuanus, a Latin poet of the Renaissance (the "Old Mantuan" of Love's Labour's Lost), were used, with Erasmus's Colloquia, and, says Mr. Collins, "such books as Ovid's Metamorphoses" (and other works of his), "the AEneid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and portions of ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... 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
... thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for himself, and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... almost a comforting thought," she said. "I know she is what she is, Jack, but her greatest crime is that she was born six hundred years too late. If she had lived in the days of the Italian Renaissance she ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... monument precludes any idea of a direct artistic tradition. The most probable explanation seems to be that the architect of the mausoleum was familiar with European Renaissance architecture, and saw the beauty to be derived from using precious marbles not merely as ornament, but in the Roman and Italian way, as a structural element. Panels and fountain-basins are ornament, and ornament changes nothing ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... of his life thereafter is one of travel and adventure in many lands. It is the period of the Renaissance, when wars and conquests, intrigues and romances, poetry and song flourish,—in all of which our Abbe is equally at home! He goes with the Duc de Guise to escort the young widowed Queen, Mary, back to her Scottish throne. He visits ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... is often immoral, but it is always 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 of gold-leaf. Even ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... '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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Jameson's "Memoirs of the Italian Painters," in Frank Preston Stearns's "Midsummer of Italian Art," in Mrs. Oliphant's "Makers of Florence," and in Symonds's volume on "Fine Arts" in the series "Renaissance in Italy." ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not hopeful for the immediate ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... jutted queerly, and odd balconies looped themselves on corners where no one expected them. They call these pretty old houses the best examples of domestic architecture, but warn you that the quaint peaked roofs are Gothic and the surprises are Renaissance—a mixture of which purists do not approve. But I am a pagan. I like mixtures. They give you little flutters of delight in your heart, and one of the most satisfactory of experiences is not to be able to analyse your emotions or to tell why you are pleased, but to feel ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... luck. But it did not last long. He found Paris a very large city, and with very little use for him. He made the most diverse efforts to support himself, nearly always without success. Once it seemed as if his hopes were to be fulfilled. The Theatre de la Renaissance accepted his "Novice of Palermo;" but at the last moment there was the usual bankruptcy of the management,—the fourth that affected him! Then he wrote a Parisian Vaudeville, but it had to be given up because the actors declared it could not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... its context, by Chapman and Pope—(or the school of Pope), the one being by a man of pure English temper, and able therefore to understand pure Greek temper; the other infected with all the faults of the falsely classical school of the Renaissance. ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... of the Hohenzollern as the political necromancers of modern Europe, as the supreme masters of statecraft. The very name of the Hohenzollern recalls to our minds a race of State-builders. Machiavelli selected the House of Borgia to illustrate the principles of the statecraft of the Renaissance. A modern Machiavelli would have to go to Potsdam to study the philosophy of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... 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 Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the story of the rise of this art to an independent and commanding position, of its perfection and its subsequent decline. The beginner must not expect to find this story told with as much fulness and certainty as is possible in dealing with the art of the Renaissance or any more modern period. The impossibility of equal fulness and certainty here will become apparent when we consider what our materials for constructing a ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word "modern" implies that we, the people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years ago the liberals ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... intellectual travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... in a sincere and poetic design of symphony is blended a splendid renaissance of pure counterpoint, that shines clear above the modern spurious pretence. The Finale of Mahler's Fifth Symphony is one of the most inspired conceptions of counterpoint in all music. In it is realized the full dream of a revival ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Servius"; the first three centuries of the republic, that is the "Coming of the Sibyl"; the closing centuries of the republic, that is the "Decline of Faith"; and finally the early empire and the "Augustan Renaissance." Like all attempts to cut history into sections these divisions are more or less arbitrary, but their convenience sufficiently justifies their creation. They must be thought of however not as representing independent blocks, arbitrarily arranged in a certain consecutive order, not as five successive ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... experiment with Individualism. This has been since the Renaissance, especially since Rousseau—a personality put as the centre and aim of education, the abhorrence of ...
— The New Ideal In Education • Nicholai Velimirovic
... 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Geneva with pursuits, homicides and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood. Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe. At the time of Milton's visit Italian letters and arts sloped midway in their descent from the Renaissance to the hideous but humorous rococo so graphically described by Vernon Lee. Free thought had perished along with free institutions in the preceding century, and as a consequence, though the physical sciences still numbered successful cultivators, originality of mind was all but extinct. ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... saturated with what painters call the "feeling" of that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he understood the spirit of the Renaissance, he understood everything. The scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Borne, the scene of another in Florence, and I moved through these cities in company with the figures whom Mark Ambient had set so vividly upon their feet. This is why ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... followed them, resolutely beating down shyness, unwillingness, timidity. My reluctant steps took me to the window of the antiquity shop, and I stood looking in before I could make up my mind to enter. Bits of rococo ware stood in the window, majolica jugs, chased metal dishes and bowls, bits of Renaissance work, tapestry, carpet, a helm with the vizor up, gaping at me as if tired of being there. I slowly drew my purse from my pocket, put together three thalers and a ten groschen piece, and with lingering, unwilling steps, entered the shop. A pretty young woman in a quaint ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... 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 ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes—like the eyes of all poets—were women's eyes. She looked, indeed, like one of those wonderful boys of the Italian Renaissance, whom you may still see at the National Gallery, whose beauty is no denial, but rather the stamp of their slender, supple strength, young painters and sculptors who held the palette for Leonardo, or wielded the chisel for Michelangelo, and anon threw both aside to take up sword ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... death of Alexander 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 reign of Eumenes II. (B.C. 197-159), or 126 ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... quite frank, he seems to me to pursue it ruthlessly, cruelly, unscrupulously. He is a man of high ideals, but without principle. In that respect he reminds one of the great spirits of the Italian Renaissance—Benvenuto Cellini and so forth—men who could pore for hours with conscientious artistic care over the detail of a hem in a sculptured robe, yet could steal out in the midst of their disinterested toil to plunge a knife in ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 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 for ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... the schoolmen took sides in this controversy, but there was no general agitation upon the subject. The "Dark Ages" had set in, and remained until the Renaissance and the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The European countries had been greatly agitated by the Crusades, which had collateral issues of an important character. Turbulent ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... by the Roman church, civilization was retarded and for centuries was practically halted in its course. The period of retrogression is known in history as the Dark Ages. The fifteenth century witnessed the movement known as the Renaissance or Revival of Learning; there was a general and significantly rapid awakening among men, and a determined effort to shake off the stupor of indolence and ignorance was manifest throughout the civilized world. By historians and philosophers the revival has been regarded ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... local celebrity, such instruments being about as rare as blue foxes in this part of the world. Conducted by the innkeeper, I called upon this gentleman. The house was one of those half-castellated manors which became scattered over France after the Renaissance, and of which the greater number were allowed to fall into complete or partial ruin when the territorial families who were interested in them were extinguished or impoverished by the Revolution. They are frequently ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... reached its apogee under the Greeks, who, more than any other race, prized Form—particularly as manifested in its highest expression, the human figure. Painting also was at its climax of technical development during the Renaissance, when life was full of movement, and costume picturesque. But at this period in each of the two arts, skill was regarded as of more importance than the subject. In other words, the perfection of the sculptor's statue or the scene depicted by the painter was of more interest ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... Chasings, the work of Cellini and Jean de Bologna; noble specimens of 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, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... horrors. The English drama, in short, was one of those evil growths which are fostered by deeply-seated social corruption, and are killed off by the breath of a purer air. That such phenomena occur at times is undeniable. Mr. Symonds has recently shown us, in his history of the Renaissance, how the Italian literature to which our English dramatists owed so many suggestions was the natural fruit of a society poisoned at the roots. Nor, when we have shaken off that spirit of slavish adulation in which modern antiquarians and critics have regarded ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the remains of an older temple on a site that seems to have been called Amada, at any rate in the later days, and so named after a city in Nubia, apparently by one of the Amen-hetep Pharaohs who had conquered it. Its style is beautiful, being of the best period of the Egyptian Renaissance ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... from the sea, though enchanting views of the Channel were frequent and exquisite. It was a palace built in old days upon the Downs, but sheltered and screened from every hostile wind. The full warmth of the south fell upon the vast but fantastic pile of the Renaissance style, said to have been built by that gifted but mysterious individual, John of Padua. The gardens were wonderful, terrace upon terrace, and on each terrace a tall fountain. But the most peculiar feature ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... life the Native Son has soaked in an art atmosphere potentially as strong and individual as ancient Greece or renaissance Italy. The dazzling country side, the sulphitic brew of races, the cosmopolitan "city" have taken care of that. That art-spirit accounts for such minor California phenomena as photography raised to unequalled art levels and shops whose simple beautiful interiors resemble the private galleries ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... the barbarian religions was so open, so noisy and so triumphant that it could not remain unnoticed. It attracted the anxious or sympathetic attention of the ancient authors, and since the Renaissance modern scholars have frequently taken interest in it. Possibly however they did not sufficiently understand that this religious evolution was not an isolated and extraordinary phenomenon, but that it accompanied and aided a more general evolution, just as that ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... to be lost to sight in the naturalistic revival of the Renaissance, which derived its inspiration solely from those periods of Greek and Roman art which were pre-occupied with the expression of external reality. Although the all-embracing genius of Michelangelo kept the "Symbolist" ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... period 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 ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... which in his time and that of his grandchildren was the only inhabited part of the chateau. This third building erected by Francois I. is more vast and far more decorated than the Louvre, the chateau of Henri II. It is in the style of architecture now called Renaissance, and presents the most fantastic features of that style. Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a time when literature was not ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naive soul of this Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naivete, his inquisitiveness, his cunning, his ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... accumulation of knowledge the intellectual snowball is getting to be of ponderous size. History's remedy for this malady has always been to knock the whole structure to pieces every now and then and begin again. Perhaps we shall have to have another period of the Dark Ages and another Renaissance to ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... named after Cardinal Zeno, who lies in the magnificent central tomb beneath a bronze effigy of himself, while his sacred hat is in crimson mosaic on each side of the altar. The tomb and altar alike are splendid rather than beautiful: its late Renaissance sculptors, being far removed from Donatello, Mino, and Desiderio, the last of whom was one of the authors of the beautiful font in the adjoining Baptistery. Earlier and more satisfactory reliefs are those of an angel on the right of the altar and a Madonna and Child on the left which date from ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... character of Kabbalistic teaching which is connected with the name of Rabbi Isaac Loria likewise is an evidence of Elijah's activity. Elijah sought out this "father of the Kabbalistic Renaissance," and revealed the mysteries of the universe to him. Indeed, he had shown his interest in him long before any one suspected the future greatness of Rabbi Isaac. Immediately after his birth, Elijah appeared to the father of the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... musical, recitation. An excellent and polished school of prose writers is the product of a tendency in national life of later origin than that which calls out the bards and ballad-singers, and is proof of a more advanced culture. The Renaissance in Italy was but the resumption of a life long suspended, and the succession of the phenomena in which was therefore far more rapid than was possible in a nation which had to trace the path without any survivals of a prior ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... his skill in music that at twenty they wished to make him official organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral. His personal taste, however, ran more to painting; for some months he worked at his canvases with an ardor too great to last long. If ever a man was touched by the Spirit of the Renaissance, it was surely young Galileo. The Archbishop of Pisa said, "Upon him has ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... propaganda. The instruments for such service we already have. The country school, the country church, neighborhood fellowship, and the Young Men's Christian Association provide the means for a moral and spiritual renaissance in the country. There is no easier way to obtain a healthy rural family life than by a skilful, serious, and large-hearted use of our moral institutions in concrete, courageous, and modern instruction, and ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... of 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 Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... folio. This lies on a high shelf near the window.[168] He begs to have the works of St. Justin, which will be found in the shelves on the left as you enter his monastery-cell. But not all his requests are for theological works. A true son of the Renaissance, he finds entertainment or instruction in communing with the best of antiquity. When in this mood he asks for his Aristotle bound in sheep's-skin; it will be found in the shelves on the right as ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... immediately succeeded them, of which the date is fixed by definite examples both in Verona and Florence, and which still exists in noble masses in the retired streets and courts of either city; too soon superseded, in the great thoroughfares, by the effeminate and monotonous luxury of Venetian renaissance, or by the heaps of quarried stone which rise into the ruggedness of their native cliffs, in the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... not present itself in this light to the Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could believe that its revival was an essential condition for the renaissance of the Roman character. Have we, in our brief examination of its characteristics, seen any features which may suggest the solution of this apparent antagonism? Was there in this formalism a life which escapes us, as we handle the dry ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... own position, not the accident of birth. But his life shows how this belief isolated him. Nor was the coincidence between the artistic spirit of the age and its limitations accidental. Just in proportion as the spirit of individualism penetrated society, and began to show itself as the Renaissance, architecture declined. The Egyptian pyramids are marvels to us, because we are accustomed to look upon the laborer as a man. But once allow that he is only so much brute force,—cheap, readily available, and to be had in endless supply, but as a moral entity less to be respected than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... occupies the entire square or block as we call it from 23rd St. to 24th St. and from Madison to Fourth Avenue. It is 700 feet and 3 inches above the sidewalk and has 50 stories. The main building which has a frontage of 200 feet by 425 feet is ten stories in height. It is built in the early Italian renaissance style the materials being steel and marble. The Campanile is carried up in the same style and is also of marble. It stands on a base measuring 75 by 83 feet and the architectural treatment is chaste, though severe, but eminently agreeable ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... in goat's flesh, Fr. bouc, has ousted flesher. German still has half a dozen surnames derived from names for this trade, e.g. Fleischer, Fleischmann, [Footnote: Hellenized as Sarkander. This was a favourite trick of German scholars at the Renaissance period. Well-known examples are Melancthon (Schwarzerd), Neander (Neumann).] Metzger, Schlechter; but our flesher has been absorbed by Fletcher, a maker of arrows, Fr. fleche. Fletcher Gate at Nottingham was formerly Flesher Gate. The undue extension of Taylor ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Vinci is one of the most famous men in history—as a man more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart—because posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and competing, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... away of the so-called dark ages. For long it was rather the privilege of the rich and powerful. The great mass of the people were not deemed worthy of learning, and education itself in any general application did not have a recognized standing in society. After the Renaissance, however, had ushered in a new age, and when the desire for learning was the master passion among many men in Southern and Western Europe, it is natural to suppose that efforts should have more frequently been made to instruct the deaf child; and after this time ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... we 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 the Italian Renaissance ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... North the feudal tie between landlord and tenant, and the sentiment of the past, preserve much of their force, and the great power in those parts is the Marquis of Newcastle, at once great territorial lord of the Middle Ages and elegant grand seigneur of the Renaissance, who brings into the field a famous regiment of his own retainers. In certain towns, such as Bradford and Manchester, there are germs of manufacturing industry, and these form the sinews of the Parliamentarian party in the district which ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... by the progress of musical and mechanical art." Its preservation during the Commonwealth period is possibly due to the personal influence of Oliver Cromwell. About that date (1831) the organ was rebuilt by Elliott and Hill. It was fitted into the old cases, of Renaissance design. From the similarity of these cases to some which are known to have inclosed organs built by Renatus Harris, the old organ has sometimes been attributed to him; but there is "no record whatever of the employment of Harris by the Dean ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... water on one side, reflected as in a broken mirror, and draped in young, golden foliage on the other, it really was an ideal castle for a fairy tale. A connoisseur in the best architecture of the Renaissance would perhaps have been ungracious enough to pick faults; for to a critical eye the turrets and arches might fall short of perfection; and there was little decoration on the time-darkened stone walls, save the thick curtain of old, old ivy; but the fairy grace of ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson |
