"Renaissance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compendious explanation of their meaning—any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description—must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? Definitio est negatio. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else—tell in a clause ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... attended to and armistice commissions dispatched; the rehabilitation of railroads and river transportation demanded attention; coal mines must be operated and labor difficulties adjusted. This economic renaissance had to be accomplished in face of nationalistic quarrels and the social unrest that threatened to spread the poison of communistic revolution as far west as ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... a learned poet of the Renaissance, drawing his inspiration from the literatures of Greece and Rome. He was also a man of sincere piety, famous for his translation of the Psalms into his native language. In his Laments, written in memory of his little daughter Ursula, who died in 1579 at the age of thirty months, he expresses ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... evils. This doctrine has had many disastrous consequences, and it is not surprising that in consequence of it celibacy should have been regarded as the ideal state. Art fell from the Greek ideal until the Renaissance, with its return to that ideal, brought new vigour. When the ancient spirit was born again its influence reached science and even religion, and the Reformation was a defence of human nature. The Lutheran doctrines resumed the principle of a "development as complete as possible ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... 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 ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... look for it honestly and without prejudice. The German Government believed that the Serbian propaganda would annihilate Austria-Hungary, and hoped, moreover, that her last faithful ally would experience a political renaissance as the result of her chastisement of Serbia. That is why they gave Count Berchtold a free hand, in the belief that Count Buelow's success over the Bosnian crisis could be repeated. Meanwhile, however, the situation had changed. Russia and France, relying ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... early Christian centuries, and the Middle Ages, were chiefly occupied with pious frauds, with forgeries of gospels, epistles, and Decretals, the impostors of the Renaissance were busy, as an Oxford scholar said, when he heard of a new MS. of the Greek Testament, "with something really important," that is with classical imitations. After the Turks took Constantinople, when the learned Greeks were scattered all over Southern Europe, when many genuine classical ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... as though the spiritual and 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 and schoolmen. Man, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the Sixteenth Century, however, open work embroidery was the favorite decoration, and from it the tangible origin of lace seems derived. During the Renaissance period the first book of embroidery patterns and lace-work appeared. The earliest volume bearing a date was printed at Cologne in 1527; and it was during the reign of Richard III. of England that the word lace was first used in the ...
— The Art of Modern Lace Making • The Butterick Publishing Co.
... charming little chapel of Brou know that it is known as one of the hundred marvels of the Renaissance; those who have not seen it must have often heard it said. Roland, who had counted on doing the honors of this historic gem to Sir John, and who had not seen it for the last seven or eight years, was much disappointed when, on arriving in front of the building, he found the niches ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... summer-house had once been painted in the arabesques of the Renaissance period; but the figures were now scarcely traceable. The woodwork had started in some places, and the sunbeams stole through the chinks and played on the floor, which was formed from old tiles quaintly tessellated and in triangular patterns; ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination that bespoke ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... CCCCC pipe was two feet long. Although almost inaudible when played alone this stop generated harmonics which powerfully reinforced the tone of the full organ. The organ is inclosed in a case designed by Mr. Arthur Hill after old renaissance examples. ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... 1945. And, because scientific research is pre-eminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the independent scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power greater than that of any condottiere captain of Renaissance Italy. ...
— The Mercenaries • Henry Beam Piper
... accuracy and dramatic action; and her twenty books for children have found welcome and entrance into the most exclusive of French homes. The publishers of this American adaptation take pleasure in introducing Madame Foa's work to American boys and girls, and in this Napoleonic renaissance are particularly favored in being able to reproduce her excellent story ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... nothing except a strange, evidently 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, as to ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... an Italian writer calls it, was so degraded that more than once both the Church and State had to use their influence to put down performances which were too infamous to be here described. When the Renaissance came the drama was reinstated in the position it occupied during the days of Roman civilization, but the plays of this period were merely imitations of the Latin comedies; and if we may judge by the most celebrated of them which still exists—the Mandragora of Macchiavelli, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... this variety was produced in the sixteenth century, the designs being bold, handsome, and purely Renaissance in type. That of the Louis Quatorze period shows the personal influence of his reign, frequently having tiny figures worked in the design. A collar in my possession has the Indian worshipping the sun (the King's ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... Shelley as a "literary cake-walk" is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the "Defense of Harriet Shelly," with those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; "Was it Heaven or Hell?"; those masterly articles on ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a dealer 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
... 1560, save for a brief period during which certain fan-shaped designs attained prettiness, there have been no good Italian bindings. In Germany, when in the fifteenth century, before the introduction of gold tooling, there was a thriving school of binders working in the mediaeval manner, the Renaissance brought with it an absolute decline. Holland, again, which in the fifteenth century had made a charming use of large panel stamps, has since that period had only two binders of any reputation, Magnus and Poncyn, of Amsterdam, who worked ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... convey any idea of the whole. The first is the entrance hall of the Hotel Vauluisant, the features of which should be photographed for the benefit of art-schools and art-decorators generally. The first is a magnificent oak ceiling; the second, a Renaissance chimney piece in carved wood, no less magnificent. The solidity, richness of design, and workmanship of both ceiling and mantel-piece afford an invaluable lesson to artists, whilst beholders can but examine them ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Europe there 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 Galileo was on the brink of his great ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... new, having been built only six years, was entirely in that charming taste of delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing, which marks with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated to about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike fancies of the Renaissance. The little open-work rose window, pierced above the portal, was, in particular, a masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced it ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Greek, there are only two religious possibilities—fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count—the Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity is Judaism ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Beziers, at St. Pourcain, at Marseilles, and at Montpellier; and he had built, for his own residence, at Bourges, the celebrated hostel which still exists as an admirable model of Gothic and national art in the fifteenth century, attempting combination with the art of Italian renaissance. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... expect the Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general like Napoleon when they are not even allowed to carry arms, or to deride them for not producing scholars like those of the Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of letters, verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you look for great Negro statesmen in states where black men are not allowed to vote? Above all, for southern white men to berate the Negro for ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... borders and forms a background to the race-course in the rear of the stands; in front rise the splendid and imposing stables of the duc d'Aumale, built by Mansard for the Great Conde; on the right is the pretty Renaissance chateau of His Royal Highness; while the view loses itself in a vast horizon of distant forest and hills of misty blue. The stands are the first that were erected in France, and in 1833 they seemed no doubt the height of comfort ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... last phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England, where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and America, which had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war, it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It will ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... with the gallery of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio's architecture was especially grievous to the sense ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Mary Howitt are inextricably associated with the England of the early nineteenth century, with the re-discovery of the beauty and interest of their native land, with the renaissance of the national passion for country pleasures and country pursuits, and with the slow, painful struggle for a wider freedom, a truer humanity, a fuller, more gracious life. The Howitts had no genius, nor were they pioneers, but, where the unfamiliar was concerned, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... thinness of body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults, and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very building itself, and sustaining it—not like the Greek caryatid, without effort—nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or impossible effort—but as if all that was silent and stern, and withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; and thus the Ghost had given, to bear up the pillars of ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the country. The deepest need of the country can be satisfied by no smaller 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, ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... speculative age it unfolded into creeds and systems. In a worshipping age it developed ceremonies and a ritual. When the fall of Rome left Europe without unity or centre, it gave it an organization and order through the Papacy. When the Papacy became a tyranny, and the Renaissance called for free thought, it suddenly put forth Protestantism, as the tree by the water-side sends forth its shoots in due season. Protestantism, free as air, opens out into the various sects, each taking hold of some human need; Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, Swedenborgianism, or Rationalism. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... an edifying story, nor a comforting one, since it illustrated the sad lot of a prophet in this world. The Romans, however, did not think of that, but greeted the statue as a sign of the Renaissance, a memorial of the classical period, and an omen of better times ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... could not 'turn in' till I had explored my bedroom, which was indeed a fascinating and enchanting chamber. It seemed to be a coign plucked out of an old French chateau, and inset here like a rare plant in an old stone wall. The panelling was of Italian intarsia work inlaid with a renaissance design portraying the tale of Cupid and Psyche; on the final panel Jupiter was handing the cup of ambrosia to Psyche with the words, 'Sume, Psyche, et immortalis esto, nec unquam digridietur a tuo nexu Cupido, sed istae vobis erunt ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... comfortably enough with a little domestic quarrel in a studio.... The story shifts suddenly, however, to a brilliantly told tragedy of the Italian Renaissance embodied in a girl's portrait.... The many readers who like Mr. De Morgan will enjoy this charming fancy greatly."—New ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in some instances striking, was still so modified as to make a most harmonious whole. For purity in architecture the best example was the Palace of Education, which was built on the lines of the Italian Renaissance. For most striking architectural effects the Mines and Metallurgy building was invariably pointed out. It was of composite architecture, comprising features of the Egyptian, Byzantine and Greek. The stately obelisks which guarded its entrance ways and the bas-relief panels which formed ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... with our advanced thinkers of the moment: Is Monogamy Feasible? or Can Men and Women be Friends? D'Annunzio is not to be approached either in a mood of radical earnestness or of evangelical fervor. He must be regarded as an artist of sensations, an Italian of the Renaissance set down in the middle of a drab century. He began his life by a quest for perfect physical pleasure through all the senses, and inaugurated its last phase with a gesture of military courage which was not only a retort to those who, like Croce, had called him a dilettante, but ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... and of revolutions, there is nowhere to be found upon the earth's surface so many characteristic attributes of Mediaeval Gothic architecture as is to be observed in this land, extending from the Romanesque types of Frejus, Perigueux and Angouleme to that classical degeneration commonly called the Renaissance, a more offensive example of which could hardly be found than in the conglomerate structure of St. Etienne du Mont at Paris, or the more modern and, if possible, even more ugly Cathedral Churches at Arras, Cambrai, or Rennes ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... route we arrive at 123 Prince Street,[Owner: Miss Margaret Frazer.] the house with a pure Directoire tent room, practically a duplicate of that at Malmaison, and another room with a magnificent painted Renaissance ceiling. How such work became a part of the sturdy two-story "Sea Captains' Houses" is one of Alexandria's mysteries. It is true that both rooms were in a deplorable state of repair, and it was necessary to trace the ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... of Germany, Ramee of France, and Selvatico of Italy, as well as Quatremal de Quincy, in his Dictionary of Architecture, who, in the article on the Comacine, remarks that "to these men, who were both designers and executors, architects, sculptors, and mosaicists, may be attributed the renaissance of art, and its propagation in the southern countries, where it marched with Christianity. Certain it is that we owe it to them, that the heritage of antique ages was not entirely lost, and it is only by their tradition ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... again; it had been unopened for more than two hundred and fifty years. It was during these alterations that the cenotaph standing over the vault was removed further east to where it now stands. It is a typical piece of Renaissance work, florid, intricate, insistent on the ghastliness of death. The effigy of the archbishop, stern and noble, lies on its marble bed supported by stacks of gilt-clasped books; underneath, a grating reveals a medley ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... then, that there was neither any science nor any Unitarianism to be heard of until the Renaissance. What was the Renaissance? It was the rising again of human liberty, the possibility once more of man's freedom to think and study. Though the armed forces of Europe were for a long time against it, the rising tide could not be entirely rolled back, and ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... remember that our forefathers reached these shores by virtue of knowledge which they owed to the astronomical researches of Egyptians and Chaldeans, who inspired the astronomers of Greece, who inspired those of the Renaissance in Italy, Spain, and Germany, keeping alive and developing not merely the art of measuring space and time, but also that conception of order in external nature without which the growth of organized knowledge, which we call science, enabling men to carry ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... daylight as of the pagan Veronese. This simplification interests us, not merely for the sake of an individual poet—full of charm as he is—but chiefly because it explains through him a transition which, under many forms, is one law of the life of the human spirit, and of which what we call the Renaissance is only a supreme instance. Just so the monk in his cloister, through the "open vision," open only to the spirit, divined, aspired to, and at last apprehended, a better daylight, but earthly, open only to the ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... and matters were put upon so friendly a footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the erection at Anizy of a new chateau, to be surrounded with an extensive and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to decorate the facade with statues—the new buildings were connected with what remained of the earlier chateau by a grand gallery; pavilions flanked the main edifice and adorned the grand cour d'honneur. King Francis, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the fingers of her right hand and one on the finger of her left which supports the Child, and suspended all over her skirts is an immense quantity of jewellery. The frame is of wood entirely coated with silver, in the form of a Renaissance doorway with a fluted column on each side and a broken pediment over the top. It is almost concealed by the jewellery hung about it, earrings, chains, necklaces, rings, watches etc. These are offerings from the faithful, but what is shown is nothing like ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... lines—a progress distinct above that which is the mere barter of the lower conditions of savagery and barbarism. In all these respects we see that civilization means a type about such as we enjoy at present. It is such as has existed in Europe since the Renaissance; because during the middle ages we could only say that Europe was in a semi-civilized condition. They knew something about writing; but at a time when Dean, the writer of the early history of England, said that throughout the whole of England there were not half a dozen men ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... turning sharply round a stone pillar, led incongruously from the light French furnishings to the chamber where Lavinia was to sleep. A Renaissance bed, made of thick quilting directly upon the floor, was covered with gilt ecclesiastical embroidery; and a movable tub stood in a stone corner. The narrow deep windows overlooked Florence, a somber expanse of roofing; and, coming rapidly toward the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... they would turn and enter the door, talking on in the same furious manner, and, walking up to the bar, click their glasses to the success of the Villivicencio ticket. Sundry swarthy and wrinkled remnants of an earlier generation were still more enthusiastic. There was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their anticipations they even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating how the ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... reader the 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 future of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... can at least claim to be the proper setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of those times, as an example of that classical renaissance which the romantic period fostered, they may ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... there anything amusing about being loved?" she thought; "what patient women the great coquettes of the world must have been! How I wish I were a crisp intelligent old maid, with a talent perhaps for gardening or books on the Renaissance!" ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... start win universal favor? It is because he had direct genius, the clear vision of a "primitive" (an artist of the pre-Renaissance). His materials were just those of a graduate who, having left college, has satisfied his curiosity. Grasping the simple and ingenious, but strong and appropriate tools that he himself has forged, he starts out in the forest of romance, and instead ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even for ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... however, widened about this time in all directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies in the mediaeval and Renaissance schools of philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of the great mystic gave ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... undertake to trace the influence of classical rhetoric on the criticisms of poetry published in England between 1553 and 1641. This influence is most readily recognized in the use by English renaissance writers on literary criticism of the terminology of classical rhetoric. But the rhetorical terminology in most cases carried with it rhetorical thinking, traces of whose influence persist in criticism of poetry ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... blinked his eyes as he saw one of the covered ways of the market, at the far end of which, framed round by this huge iron nave, appeared a side entrance of St. Eustache with its rose and its tiers of arched windows. And then, with an air of defiance, he would remark that all the middle ages and the Renaissance put together were less mighty than the central markets. Afterwards, as they paced the broad new streets, the Rue du Pont Neuf and the Rue des Halles, he explained modern life with its wide footways, its lofty houses, and its luxurious ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... screen, and monuments require a chapter to themselves. Let us hope that some future traveller, more learned than myself in such matters, will give us their history in detail. The town, too, possesses some fine remains of Renaissance architecture, and the views from the ancient ramparts ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... on Pottery and Porcelain of the Renaissance and Modern periods, with historical notices of each Manufactory.... By William Chaffers. Fourth edition. London, 1874. ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... the Renaissance; the Renaissance made printing. Printing did not begin the publication and dissemination of books. There were libraries of vast extent in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome. There were universities centuries before Gutenberg where the few instructed the ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... history and its treasures would fill such a volume as this. In shape it is a parallelogram, about 280 feet long by 70 feet wide, with two wings on the S. front. The centre between the two wings is Italian Renaissance in style; the central tower, pierced by the great gate, being of rich Elizabethan design. On the face of the third storey of the tower are the armorial bearings of the Earl of Salisbury. This S. front and the two wings enclose on three sides a quadrangle ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... indicated, that the Germans, in a generation only just passed away, had here in Rome formed a learned school based on the antique; Lessing, in his treatise, the 'Laocoon,' and Winckelmann, by his criticisms on the marbles of the Vatican, had induced a new Classic Renaissance. The painter Raphael Mengs, thus guided, appropriately executed in the Villa Albani the famous fresco of Apollo and the Nine Muses on Mount Parnassus. Again, here are men and manifestations not to be disdained. But for such art Overbeck, as we have seen, cherished inveterate antipathy: whether ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... tempting to dream of a new Renaissance, under which the life of reason will at last be the life of mankind. Though there is little sign of improvement in human nature, a favourable conjunction of circumstances may bring about a civilisation ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint traces of the romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years between the ebb of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of Second-empire renaissance. Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous old homestead, fit for ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... abaque, tailloir), in architecture, the upper member of the capital of a column. Its chief function is to provide a larger supporting surface for the architrave or arch it has to carry. In the Greek Doric order the abacus is a plain square slab. In the Roman and Renaissance Doric orders it is crowned by a moulding. In the Archaic-Greek Ionic order, owing to the greater width of the capital, the abacus is rectangular in plan, and consists of a carved ovolo moulding. In later examples the abacus ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... been accepted without question by the Middle Ages. The sudden freedom of the mind from these older bonds brought a consciousness of power such as had never been felt before; and the restless energy, the universal activity of the Renaissance were but outer expressions of the pride, the joy, the amazing self-confidence, with which man welcomed this revelation of the energies which had lain slumbering ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... The Pre-Raphaelites imitate no pictures: they paint from nature only. But they have opposed themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... represented, in the fifth century, the wisdom of Greece and the majesty of Rome; and that they ended with a jubilant return to the Promised Land of ancient art and literature. But the interval had been no mere sojourning in Egypt. The scholars of the Renaissance destroyed as much as they created. They overthrew one civilisation to clear the ground for another. It was imperative that the old canons of thought and conduct should be reconsidered. The time comes in the history of all half-truths when they form the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... he censured the corruptions of the Roman Court, the personal qualities by which he—a foreigner and a mere monk—made himself for a short period the lawgiver, the prophet, and virtually the dictator of Florence—that Florence which was at the time the very gemmary of the Renaissance—his sudden fall and tragic death; all combine to attract toward him our admiration, pity, and love, and to leave upon our minds the impression of his extraordinary moral genius. And yet, though a spiritual side was not wanting in Savonarola, we should not quote him ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... outstretched over his head: Melencolia! There is more poignant music in the Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas—Pater calls them "peevish"—in his Venus of the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art missing in the lacerated realistic holy people of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli, but it is not ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 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 was the park, which was undulating and extensive, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... 'peopled by boors!' She turned away from her discourteous informant and contemplated the grey walls of the castle, so strong and grim, yet dressed with the gracious flowers of a lavish spring. As she stood admiring the wonderful Renaissance gateway, one side of the huge door was pushed open and a young man in student's dress emerged. His face, though sickly and emaciated, interested her by reason of its vivid intelligence and a certain mocking look of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... mother. She was not a clever woman in a worldly sense, yet her sympathy, from the hourly appeals to it, had grown as fine as intellect. She was hopelessly ignorant of ancient history and the Italian Renaissance; but she had a genius for the affections, and where a greater mind would have blundered over a wound, her soft hand went by intuition to the spot. It was very pleasant to sit in a rosewood chair in her parlour, to hear ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 spontaneous ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand by the word, [xii] giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote that revival of classical ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Had I gone by the noon train from Florence I should have travelled this road by night, had I caught the 3.27 A.M. train I should have seen nothing for storm and cloud. And—what a glorious, what an unrivalled road that is! It was like passing through a gallery hung with Renaissance tapestry, all in freshness of colour. The sea deep blue and green like a peacock's neck, the mountains pale yellow, as shown in tapestry, with blue shadows; the silvery-grey olives, the glossy orange trees with their fruit—exactly as in tapestry. Surely the old weavers ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... the arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new, realistic drama was leading us out of a pasteboard world into something approximating an intelligent comment on life, the cloak-and-sword drama was having a fine little reactionary renaissance, the calcium moon was shining down on many a gleaming garden and flashing blade, and ears were rapturously strained to catch the murmur of love-laden words. Then it was that the stage sundial flourished in all its glory, generally ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 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 or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli or Michael Angelo himself. For they named a lovely ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... how far he who knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking glass between them. Transformed, shifted or mutilated, such elements of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them.... It is thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous little tails of the German postilion's coat show of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... her brother, their offences upon the scaffold at Paris. Every effort was made to spare their lives; but the King, or rather Queen Margot, was inexorable. The chateau of Tourlaville is beautifully situated; it is in the style of the Renaissance, with an angular tower, which recalls that of Heidelberg Castle. The ground-floor consists of two large unfurnished rooms, and a staircase, with iron railing, leads to the story above. In one room hangs the portrait of a lady chateleine, in the costume of the period ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... that the Renaissance inaugurated a period of paganism. They have gloried that there supervened upon this paganism the religious revival which the Reformation was. Even these men will, however, not deny that it was the intellectual rejuvenation ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... time to time, old grammatical forms die away or become obliterated, new names and verbs are borrowed, first from the Norman-French at the Conquest, then from the classical Greek and Latin at the Renaissance; but the continuity of the language remains unbroken, and its substance is still essentially the same as at the beginning. The Cornish, the Irish, and to some extent the Welsh, have left off speaking their native tongues, and adopted the language of the dominant ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... the house with screens or light partitions instead of walls lent itself to a style of decoration which was quite as different in its exigencies and character from Occidental mural decorations as was Japanese architecture from Gothic or Renaissance. The first native school of decorative artists was the Yamato-ryu, founded in the eleventh century by Fujiwara Motomitsu and reaching the height of its powers in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... chapel, with its monuments of a fashion long passed away, and its heraldic adornments, suggestive of the age of chivalry, forms a picture at once imposing and pathetic. The monuments are of considerable interest, and are good examples of Renaissance ornament and sculpture of three successive periods. The Bigge family, to the memory of whom they were erected, inherited through Sir Philip Hoby much of the Abbey land in this district. Early in the seventeenth century their mansion ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... go back to our makers!" sighed the Gubbio plate, thinking of Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gracious days of the Renaissance: and somehow the words touched the frolicsome souls of the dancing jars, the spinning teapots, the chairs that were playing cards; and the violin stopped its merry music with a sob, and the spinnet sighed, ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... that 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 Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of the writers of the Paston Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated, persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself—that is to say, of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well as a schoolmaster. And while from all these ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... reached under it, snapping off a switch. As he straightened, the door from the reception-office opened and his secretary, Kathie O'Grady, entered, loading a cigarette into an eight-inch amber holder. She was a handsome woman, built on the generous lines of a Renaissance goddess; none of the Renaissance masters, however, had ever employed a model so strikingly Hibernian. She had blue eyes, and a fair, highly-colored complexion; she wore green, which went well with her flaming red hair, and a good deal ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. They were "on the make." The rich in Montpelier and Nmes, a knot of them in Rome itself, many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance, supported the strong inflamed critics of clerical misliving, and even winked solemnly at the lunatic inspirations of obscure men and women filled with "visions." They did all these things as though their object was religious change. But their true ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... grew about that small, charming, pinnacled edifice, which was built upon the spot of Wamba's old gate in Alfonso VI's time, and was then completely Moorish in style. In 1576 it was restored and took on its present half renaissance, half ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... 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 ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... of high six-story houses, attracted my attention. It threw upon the pavement a shadow which the sunshine, penetrating between the badly joined boards, striped with beautiful parallel streaks of gold, such as one sees on the fine black satins of the Renaissance. I strolled over to it and peered ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... especial reference to the denial of this principle in modern and Renaissance architecture, that I speak of that architecture with a bitterness which appears to many readers extreme, while in reality, so far from exaggerating, I have not grasp enough of thought to embrace, the evils which have resulted among all the orders of European society ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... profession, I expect; I've just thought of it. I'm going to be a buyer for the Ignorant Rich. Make their houses liveable-in. They tell me what they want—I get hold of it for them. Turn them out an Italian drawing-room—Della Robbia mantel-piece, Florentine fire-irons, Renaissance ceiling, tapestries and so on. Things they haven't energy to find for themselves or intelligence to know when they see them. I love finding them, and I'm practised at cheating. One has to cheat if one's poor but eager.... A poor trade, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... The Italian Renaissance was the birth of Romantic Love. It was a new thing, and we have not gotten used to it yet. It is so new to men's natures that they do not always know how to manage it, and so it occasionally runs away with them and leaves them struggling in the ditch, from which they emerge sorry sights, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... The scientific renaissance brought a wealth of fresh impressions and some freedom from the tyranny of tradition, and the twofold stimulus stirred the speculative activity of a great variety of men from old Claude Duret of Moulins, of whose ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... that all the liberties, reforms and political achievements of society have been gained by nations thrilling and throbbing to one great enthusiasm. The Renaissance does not mean a single Dante, nor Boccaccio, but a national enthusiasm and a "god within all minds." The Reformation is not a single Savonarola, nor Luther, but a universal enthusiasm and "a god within," all ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for one form of religion against another, but for truth against falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had been emperor, we might never have ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... down over her soul, she had looked into and across the world with a pair of eyes that seemed to reflect the very blue and white of a June sky. No doubt she had thought to breast the hills and sail the seas again in some renaissance of vigour. No doubt her "retreat," like a Roman Catholic's, was designed to be merely temporary. She aped the hermit for the sake of a sojourn in the hermitage. She came to her island of Avalon to be restored of her weary limbs and her blistered feet, so to speak; and there ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... excellence. An excellent type of such a restaurant is Maire's, at the corner of the Bd. St-Dennis, owned by the company which controls the Paillard's Restaurant of the Champs Elysees. It is a good place to dine at for any one going to the play at the Porte St-Martin, the Renaissance, the Theatre Antoine, or any of the music halls or theatres in the west of Paris. Mushrooms always seem to me to play a great part in the cookery at Maire's, and the Poulet Maire is a fowl cooked with mushrooms; but the restaurant has a ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... elegant pavilion at the northern extremity of the grounds in the renaissance style, which was a copy, although reduced in dimensions, of the two higher stories of the central part of the "Casa Rosador," or "Pink Palace," the principal Government building in Buenos Aires. In the pavilion was installed the offices of the Commission, a reception ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... and architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their interiors rich with black and white tiling and with colored glass. The silver facings of the altars and their melodious bell chimes are ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... three, had not yet attained the dignity of a place at the table but sat in a high-chair at Persis' left and drummed with her spoon upon the adjustable shelf which served the double purpose of keeping her in place and supporting her bowl of bread and milk. The renaissance of the high-chair was responsible for a curious surge of emotion through Joel's consciousness. Persis herself had once occupied that chair and for a moment his sister's matronly figure at the head of the table was singularly suggestive ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... been more depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... portrait head, Hellenistic Age 11 Carnelian, bust portrait of the Roman emperor Decius 12 Beryl, portrait of Julia Domna wife of the emperor Septimius Severus 13 Sapphire, head of the Madonna 14 Carnelian, the judgment of Paris, Renaissance work 15 Rock crystal, Madonna with Jesus and St. Joseph, probably ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Mahbrook about. Sometimes I whistle and hear hader (ready) from the water and in tumbles Achmet, with the water running 'down his innocent nose' and looking just like a little bronze triton of a Renaissance fountain, with a blue shirt and white skull-cap added. Mahbrook is a big lubberly lad of the laugh-and-grow-fat breed, clumsy, but not stupid, and very good and docile. You would delight in his guffaws, and the merry games and hearty laughter of my menage is very pleasant ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... conscience, are part and parcel of one comprehensive change,—a change which even now has not reached its goal. It was not so much "the arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance," that created the new epoch: it was "the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... present his views on the race problem in the United States. Primarily polemic and ex-parte, this work will hardly attract the attention of the investigator. But when an author like this one, a man of reputation and influence among his people, writes on such subjects as the "renaissance" of the Negro, his constitutional status, and discusses Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, the serious reader might well pause to give this work more ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... at that time was the Renaissance, and he often applied to me for free seats, as he was too poor to pay for the luxuries of art. Ah, poverty, what a sorry counsellor art thou, and how tolerant we ought to be to those ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... with the later evolution of perpetual motion devices. The most comprehensive treatment is H. Dircks, Perpetuum mobile, London, 1861; 2nd ser., London, 1870. So far as I know there has not previously been much discussion of the history of such devices before the renaissance. ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... non-dramatic poetry from the Renaissance onwards is second to none in richness of thought and beauty of diction, but it lacks the highest quality of all—universality of interest and appeal. Our poets have turned a cold shoulder to the activities and aims of the ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... 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 ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... necessary to render an arcaded front like this quite complete within itself; otherwise it must more or less appear to be only part of a larger building. The style is Late Gothic, designed when the first influence of the Early Renaissance was beginning to be felt through France as well as Belgium, and in several respects the design has ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... book is on the probable site of Horace's country- house, a subject that has interested many scholars from the Renaissance down to our own day. M. Boissier, following the investigations of Signor Rosa, places it on a little hill over-looking the Licenza, and his theory has a great deal to recommend it. The plough still turns up on the spot the bricks and tiles of an old Roman villa; a spring of clear ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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, besides the study of masterpieces, absorbs the science of counterpoint, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... old groves, and the classic form and style of the old revolution still swayed all the minor minds, there sprung up a reaection in the so-called romantic school of which Victor Hugo became the leader. The medieval renaissance, which fifty years before had penetrated Germany and England, and indeed all the North, was late in coming to France, but when it did come it stirred the Latin Quarter and Young France wonderfully. If its results were less remarkable in literature than in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of true progress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated as a disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times—"The Renaissance perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us"—and so on. The tone ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... literature than the mood which prevailed in that day. For the book has long been out of print. These "Irish Fairy Tales" were written, and printed on Irish paper, and published through an Irish publisher—Leamy would not bring out a book in any other way—before the Celtic renaissance had arrived. This is one of the facts which make them interesting. Perhaps, as some would tell us, seventeen years ago was a benighted time; at any rate we must admit it was rather dark from an Irish literary, or even "Irish Ireland," point of view. It was ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... dear young Spirit of the Renaissance, I am not yet dead, not even dying. Slowly I am doing the stations of the Cross in this most thorough institution. I am delighted with my experience. Here is concentrated every form of torture and annoyance to which one can be legally subjected. Cruel and unusual punishments ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... felicitons! We've got him still—in Madame Tussaud's," cried Janet "He poisoned for money in cold blood—not exactly an artistic vice! Oh, he won't do!"—she laughed triumphantly—"if he did write charming things about the Renaissance! Besides, he illustrates my case; among us he was a phenomenon, like the elephant-headed man. Phenomena are for the scientists. You don't mean to tell me that any literature that pretends to call itself artistic has a right to ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... almost a story to itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic, and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and the Pastoral ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the castles of rebellious nobles. A baron's castle was easily knocked to pieces by the prince who owned, or could borrow, a few pieces of heavy ordnance. The towering walls of the old-time strongholds slowly gave way to the earthwork-protected Renaissance fortification, which is typified in the United States by Castillo de San Marcos, in Castillo de San Marcos ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... colonizing people, like the Anglo-Saxons. The native shed something of his insularity and became a traveler, going first to view the places where trade had opened the way, and returning with wider interests and a larger horizon. Above all, the first dawn of the Renaissance is heralded in England, as in Spain and Italy, by the appearance of a ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Hence, just as the wise critic will not neglect aesthetics, so the philosopher of art should be something of a critic. Yet the division of labor is clear enough. The critic devotes himself to the appreciation of some special contemporary or historical field of art—Shakespearean drama, Renaissance sculpture, Italian painting, for example; while the philosopher of art looks for general principles, and gives attention to individual works of art and historical movements only for the purpose of discovering ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... search in vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-loft and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably was in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing, I pierce through ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... sombre church was of dazzling old gold, with a profusion of twisted columns, of complicated entablements, of statues with excessive convolutions and with draperies in the style of the Spanish Renaissance. And this magnificence of the tabernacle was in contrast with the simplicity of the lateral walls, simply kalsomined. But an air of extreme old age harmonized these things, which one felt were accustomed for centuries to endure in the face of ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... the legend he carved under these cruder symbols was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with AEsop or began with Adam, whether they were German and mediaeval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same: that superiority is always insolent, because it is always accidental; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... ancient volumes were usually limited. By degrees, fine vellum, alike conspicuous for its delicacy of quality and beauty of tone, was introduced, and became fashionable among the patrons of literature in Italy and elsewhere during the Renaissance. No such luxurious mode of presenting the type and giving full effect to the work of the illuminator, which so constantly formed a feature and a charm in the productions of the presses of the Continent of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has ever since ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... awakening of Europe was completed. The Turks took Constantinople, and drove large numbers of Greek scholars to Italy. Out of this catastrophe issued the great Renaissance, or rebirth, of art, science, and letters in Italy, and then in France, Germany, and England. In the new intellectual ferment there appeared the great artists, great thinkers and inventors, and great navigators who led the race to fresh heights. The invention of printing alone would ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... dating from the Conquest. The Normans seem to have settled there early in considerable numbers, and their energy and enterprise began the development which continued throughout the Middle Age and the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, however, Southampton rapidly declined, and this continued till in the time of our grandfathers it was arrested and Southampton rose again, to become the chief port of southern England. So extraordinary indeed has been her modern development that it has completely ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... substantial form in a single instance worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the commercial republics of Italy. This does not mean that our rich people have not so much money as the Italians of the Renaissance, but that perhaps in their folie des grandeurs they are a different kind of madmen; it means also that land and labor are dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built after the plans of the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... 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 as clearly welded to art as it is now, La Fontaine said of the chateau ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... how the greatest masters of the High Renaissance—Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael—used to come here to study, and thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... much Fun during his Second Time on Earth that he decided to make it a sure-enough Renaissance, so he married a Type-Writer 19 years old, that he met in a Hotel Lobby, and then Joel did go up in ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... of the standing puzzles of literary criticism, and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic criteria. Though it was accepted as Vergilian by Renaissance readers simply because the manuscripts of the poem and ancient writers, from Lucan and Statius to Martial and Suetonius, all attribute the work to him, recent critics have usually been skeptical or downright recusant. Some insist that it is a forgery ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank |
