6io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



WHAT MASTERPIECES OF GREEK SCULPTURE WERE 



KNOWN TO THE MEN OF THE RENAISSANCE? 



A CENSUS 



Bv EDWARD S. IIOLDEN 



U. S MILITARY ACADEMY 



SOME popular writers on the Renaissance give, and seek to give, 

 the impression that the sculpture known to the Renaissance was 

 pure, high Greek, and that these masterpieces set all Italy astir. 

 Scholars know better, but most of us are not scholars. 



All my life I have been bullied by statements of the sort, and at 

 last the worm has turned and has consulted the scholars, as it should 

 have done long ago. The following paragraphs will seem of very slight 

 importance to the few students who know, but they may have some 

 interest to others. If I — no scholar — knew where the data which I 

 have here tabulated could be found collected, such paragraphs might 

 well be quoted. But I do not know, and many otliers are probably as 

 ignorant as I. It is for them and myself that I am writing, making 

 every apology to the real scholars; and in partial excuse, asking them 

 why I have not been able to find such tables as I here give in some 

 handbook or manual. 



Here follow a few quotations from writers on the fine arts of the 

 Renaissance. All of them give the scholar's point of view. For brevity, 

 I have sometimes ventured to summarize them. 



Whatever may be the facts of to-day, the eye of Europe in the middle ages 

 was not accustomed to Greco-Roman forms in art. In Spain, France, Gtermany 

 or Britain, the Roman ruins were even then so rare . . . that any knowledge 

 of them . . . was out of question. In Italy, Roman ruins were no rarity, and 

 in Rome they were abundant, but the idea of copying them never suggested 

 itself to an Italian of the middle age. That antiquarian and historic interest 

 in relics of the past, which is so natural to us, is an interest which dates from 

 the Renaissance. To the middle age the ruin was a quarry; nothing more.' 



How the interest in the literature of the ancients brought about a 

 revival in the arts — architecture, painting, sculpture — need not be 

 recited here. The story has been told a thousand times. One point 

 may be emphasized, perhaps. The share of science in the revival has 

 not been sufficiently recognized by most writers on the period. The 

 name of Copernicus, for instance, is not mentioned in the index of any 



' Goodyear, " Renaissance in Modern Art," p. 4tf. 



