RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. I6OO
manners, graceful, a good causeur and a good dancer, yet strong and
fit, well versed in the pursuits of chivalry, riding, fencing and joust-
ing. At the same time he should read poetry and history, be acquain-
ted with Plato and Aristotle, understand all the arts, and practise
music and drawing. Leonardo da Vinci was the first amongst artists
to live up to this ideal: painter, architect, engineer and musician, one
of the most ingenious scientists of his time, and enchanting in his
personal ways. Only Christianity apparently did not occupy his
mind at all. Lorenzo Valla, a Roman humanist, somewhat earlier
had published his dialogue De voluptate, in which he openly praised
the pleasures of the senses. The same Valla proved with a philological
sagacity unknown before the rise of Humanism that the so-called
Donation of Constantine, the document on which all papal claims to
worldly domination rested, was faked. Yet he died a canon of the
Lateran Cathedral in Rome. The philosophers of Florence founded
an academy on Plato's model, kept Plato's supposed birthday as a
holiday and preached a semi-Greek, semi-Christian religion in which
Christ's love is mixed up with Plato's principle of divine love that
makes us pine for beauty of soul and body in human beings. On one
of the frescoes in the choir of Sta. Maria Novella an inscription can
be read stating that the frescoes were completed in 1490, ."when this
loveliest of lands distinguished in riches, victories, arts and buildings
enjoyed plenty, health and peace". About the same time Lorenzo the
Magnificent wrote his most famous poem, which begins as follows:
Quanf^ bella giovinezza,
Che sifugge tuttavia.
Chi vuol esser lieto sia.
Di dotnan non c I certezza.
The lines are well known, and rightly so. They are here quoted in
Italian, because they should be remembered in all their original
melodiousness. Literally translated they mean:
How lovely is youth.
But it flies from us.
If you want to be happy, be happy now*
There is no certainty of to-morrow.
Now these men, if they built a church, did not want to be reminded
by its appearance of that uncertain to-morrow and of what may
come after this life has ended. They wanted architecture to eternalise
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