A somewhat different type of painter is found in the Dutchman, Rembrandt (1606-1669), who lived a stormy and unhappy life in the towns of Leyden and Amsterdam. It must be remembered that Holland, while following her national career of independence, commerce, and colonial undertaking, had become stanchly Protestant. Neither the immoral paganism of antiquity nor the medieval legends of Catholicism would longer appeal to the Dutch people as fit subjects of art. Rembrandt, prototype of a new school, therefore painted the actual life of the people among whom he lived and the things which concerned them—lively portraits of contemporary burgomasters, happy pictures of popular amusements, stern scenes from the Old Testament. His Lesson in Anatomy and his Night Watch in their somber settings, are wonderfully realistic products of Rembrandt's mastery of the brush.
[Sidenote: Rembrandt]
[Sidenote: Music]
Thus painting, like architecture and sculpture, was perfected in sixteenth-century Italy and speedily became the common property of Christian Europe. Music, too, the most primitive and universal of the arts, owes in its modern form very much to the sixteenth century. During that period the barbarous and uncouth instruments of the middle ages were reformed. The rebeck, to whose loud and harsh strains the medieval rustic had danced, [Footnote: The rebeck probably had been borrowed from the Mohammedans.] by the addition of a fourth string and a few changes in form, became the sweet-toned violin, the most important and expressive instrument of the modern orchestra. As immediate forerunner of our present-day pianoforte, the harpsichord was invented with a keyboard carried to four octaves and the chords of each note doubled or quadrupled to obtain prolonged tones.
[Sidenote: Palestrina]
In the person of the papal organist and choir-master, Palestrina (1524- 1594), appeared the first master-composer. He is justly esteemed as the father of modern religious music and for four hundred years the Catholic Church has repeated his inspired accents. A pope of the twentieth century declared his music to be still unrivaled and directed its universal use. Palestrina directly influenced much of the Italian music of the seventeenth century and the classical German productions of the eighteenth.
NATIONAL LITERATURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Latin and the Vernaculars]
Latin had been the learned language of the middle ages: it was used in the Church, in the universities, and in polite society. If a lecturer taught a class or an author wrote a book, Latin was usually employed. In those very middle ages, however, the nations of western Europe were developing spoken languages quite at variance with the classical, scholarly tongue. These so-called vernacular languages were not often written and remained a long time the exclusive means of expression of the lower classes—they consequently not only differed from each other but tended in each case to fall into a number of petty local dialects. So long as they were not largely written, they could achieve no fixity, and it was not until after the invention of printing that the national languages produced extensive national literatures.
Just when printing was invented, the humanists—the foremost scholars of Europe—were diligently engaged in strengthening the position of Latin by encouraging the study of the pagan classics. Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were again read by educated people for their substance and for their style. Petrarch imitated the manner of Latin classics in his letters; Erasmus wrote his great works in Latin. The revival of Greek, which was also due to the humanists, added to the learning and to the literature of the cultured folk, but Greek, even more than Latin, was hardly understood or appreciated by the bulk of the people.
Then came the sixteenth century, with its artistic developments, its national rivalries, its far-away discoveries, its theological debates, and its social and religious unrest. The common people, especially the commercial middle class, clamored to understand: and the result was the appearance of national literatures on a large scale. Alongside of Latin, which was henceforth restricted to the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and to particularly learned treatises, there now emerged truly literary works in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, etc. The printing of these works at once stereotyped their respective languages, so that since the sixteenth century the written forms of the vernacular tongues have been subject to relatively minor change. Speaking generally, the sixteenth century witnessed the fixing of our best known modern languages.