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It was the grand consummation of Italian
intelligence in many departments--the arrival at maturity of the
Christian trained mind tempered by the philosophy of Greece, and the
knowledge of the actual world. Fully aroused at last, the Italian
intellect became inquisitive, inventive, scientific, skeptical--yes,
treacherous, immoral, polluted. It questioned all things, doubted
where it pleased, saturated itself with crime, corruption, and
sensuality, yet bowed at the shrine of the beautiful and knelt at the
altar of Christianity. It is an illustration of the contradictions
that may exist when the intellectual, the religious, and the moral
are brought together, with the intellectual in predominance.
[Illustration: FIG. 38.--FRA BARTOLOMMEO. DESCENT FROM CROSS. PITTI.]
And that keen Renaissance intellect made swift progress. It remodelled
the philosophy of Greece, and used its literature as a mould for its
own. It developed Roman law and introduced modern science. The world
without and the world within were rediscovered.


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