Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional.

Nor did the art of the Renaissance stop here.

It went further, and plunged into Paganism.
Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a sentiment alien to Christianity.
Through the instrumentality of art, and of all the ideas which art introduced into daily life, the Renaissance wrought for the modern world a real resurrection of the body, which, since the destruction of antique civilization, had lain swathed up in hair-shirts and cerements within the tomb of the mediaeval cloister.

It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human speculation, the importance of human life regarded as a thing apart from religious rules and dogmas.

During the Middle Ages a few students had possessed the poems of Virgil and the prose of Boethius--and Virgil at Mantua, Boethius at Pavia, had actually been honored as saints--together with fragments of Lucan, Ovid, Statius, Juvenal, Cicero, and Horace.