1 6 Contemporary Evolution. 



imagery all but as exclusively decorated the cottage, the 

 palace, and the market-place. The purity of Christian 

 morality had accidentally resulted in the banishment of 

 the nude, and the vigour and perseverance with which 

 the strongest natures and the acutest intellects devoted 

 themselves to philosophy bore an inverse ratio to the 

 energy with which traditional physics were almost un- 

 profitably cultivated. 



It is no difficult matter even now to realise the joy- 

 ousness, the feeling of relief with which many minds 

 must have hailed the first blossoming of that sweet 

 artistic spring the early Renaissance. Soon on each 

 edifice, as if struck by a magic wand, every decorative 

 detail, every niche and pinnacle blossoms out with a new 

 life spreading over the architectural masses (the masses, 

 as in St. Eustache, of Paris, still continuing as before), 

 disguising them as some fair creeper may seem to re- 

 place the proper foliage of the tree it clasps. 



To appreciate the delicacy and refinement, the full 

 charm of the great movement architecturally, we must 

 seek in it the land of its birth in Italy, where the 

 Certosa of Pavia, that dream of beauty, presents us with 

 perhaps its most perfect expression still essentially be- 

 longing to mediaeval Christian art, yet modified by the 

 movement to come, a maiden with the blush of an ap- 

 proaching revelation, Margaret for the first time essay- 

 ing Faust's fatal offering of pearls. 



