THE SPIHIT OF THE RENAISSANCE
of art. He endeavoured to prove that painting and architecture were
of the liberal arts, not arts in the trade sense of the Middle Ages,
There are two sides to this theory. It demands from the patron a new
attitude towards the artist, but also from the artist a new attitude
towards his work. Only the artist who approached his art in an
academic spirit, that is as a seeker after law, had a right to be re-
garded as their equal by the scholars and authors of humanism.
Leonardo has not much to say about Antiquity. But the universal
fascination of Antiquity was evidently both aesthetic and social,
aesthetic in so far as the forms of Roman architecture and decoration
appealed to artists and patrons of the ifth century, social in so far
as the study of the Roman past was accessible to the educated only.
So the artist and architect who until then had been satisfied with
learning their craft from their masters and developing it according
to tradition and their powers of imagination, now devoted their
attention to the art of Antiquity, not only because it enchanted them
but also because it conferred social distinction on them. So strongly
had this revival impressed the scholars from the i6th to the ipth
century that they called the whole period that of rebirth, rinascita
or Renaissance. Early writers by using this term meant the rebirth
of art and letters in quite a general sense. But in the ipth century—
a century of unlimited period revival—the emphasis was laid on the
imitation of Roman forms and motifs. In re-examining the works
of the Renaissance to-day, one must however ask oneself whether
the new attitude towards Antiquity is really their essential innova-
tion.
The very first building in Renaissance forms is Brunelleschi's
Foundling Hospital, begun in 1419 (pi. xxvm). Brunelleschi (1377-
1446) was a goldsmith by training. Yet he had been chosen to com-
plete the cathedral of Florence by adding the dome over the cross-
ing, a masterpiece of construction and of a shape distinctly Gothic
in character. At the same time, however, he designed the Foundling
facade, a work of a completely different kind, consisting of a colon-
nade on the ground floor with delicate Corinthian columns and wide
semicircular arches letting enough sun and warmth penetrate into
the loggia, and a first floor with generously spaced moderately sized
rectangular windows under shallow pediments corresponding exactly
to the arches beneath. Medallions in coloured .terra-cotta by delk
Robbia—the famous babes in swaddling clothes sold in cheap copies
of all sizes by the souvenir-dealers of Florence—are placed into the
B.A.—7 79