These, he says,
and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean protection, were the baits
which really attracted him, if he were again asked to go as Ferrarese
ambassador to Rome.
But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only archaeological
zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac of sentimental
melancholy. In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling.
Poggio Bracciolini often visited the temple of Venus and Roma, in the
belief that it was that of Castor and Pollux, where the senate used so
often to meet, and would lose himself in memories of the great orators
Crassus, Hortensius, Cicero. The language of Pius II, especially in
describing Tivoli, has a thoroughly sentimental ring, and soon
afterwards (1467) appeared the first pictures of ruins, with a
commentary by Polifilo. Ruins of mighty arches and colonnades, half hid
in plane-trees, laurels, cypresses and brushwood, figure in his pages.
In the sacred legends it became the custom, we can hardly say how, to
lay the scene of the birth of Christ in the ruins of a magnificent
palace. That artificial ruins became afterwards a necessity of
landscape gardening is only a practical consequence of this feeling.
The Classics
But the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, were of
far more importance than the architectural, and indeed than all the
artistic remains which it had left.
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