My age more excellent than youth itself,
And all that I have hitherto accomplished
As only vanity."

"It was an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized,
complete. Artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the
world had elevated and made keen, breathed a common air and caught light
and heat from each other's thoughts. It is this unity of spirit which
gives unity to all the various products of the Renaissance, and it is to
this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best
thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth
century owes much of its grave dignity and influence."[A]

[A] Walter Pater: "Studies in the Renaissance."

It is to this unity of the arts we owe the fact that the art of
beautifying the home took its proper place. During the Middle Ages the
Church had absorbed the greater part of the best man had to give, and
home life was rather a hit or miss affair, the house was a fortress, the
family possessions so few that they could be packed into chests and
easily moved. During the Renaissance the home ideal grew, and, although
the Church still claimed the best, home life began to have comforts and
beauties never dreamed of before. The walls glowed with color,
tapestries and velvets added their beauties, and the noble proportions
of the marble halls made a rich background for the elaborately carved
furniture.

The doors of Italian palaces were usually inlaid with woods of light
shade, and the soft, golden tone given by the process was in beautiful,
but not too strong, contrast with the marble architrave of the doorway,