All Western Europe, as soon as its wealth enabled it to do
so, set to work in the same way at the close of the Middle Ages. But
its efforts produced either childish and fantastic toy-work, or were
bound by the chains of a narrow and purely Gothic art, while the
Renaissance moved freely, entering into the spirit of every task it
undertook and working for a far larger circle of patrons and admirers
than the northern artists. The rapid victory of Italian decorative art
over northern in the course sixteenth century is due partly to this
fact, though the result of wider and more general causes.
Language and Society
The higher forms of social intercourse, which here meet us as a work of
art--as a conscious product and one of the highest products of national
life have no more important foundation and condition than language. In
the most flourishing period of the Middle Ages, the nobility of Western
Europe had sought to establish a 'courtly' speech for social
intercourse as well as for poetry. In Italy, too, where the dialects
differed so greatly from one another, we find in the thirteenth century
a so-called 'Curiale,' which was common to the courts and to the poets.
It is of decisive importance for Italy that the attempt was there
seriously and deliberately made to turn this into the language of
literature and society.
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