passed into the language of history.

Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
globe, and on the other the conquest by Science of all that we now know
about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
illustrated by Pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
illustrated by Biblical antiquity; these are the two regions, at first
apparently distinct, afterwards found to be interpenetrative, which the
critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
work, art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected
with the religious feelings of the people, formulæ from which to deviate
would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshiper.
Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and
stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even
had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms
he saw around him. But with the dawning of the Renaissance, a new spirit
in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in
itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became
to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the
utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from
the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery,
invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the
expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he
humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister-frescoes upon which he