In the St. Jerome peacefully at work in his panelled study, translating the Bible, while the blessed sun shines in and the lion and the little bear doze contentedly, is not Luther foretold? But the German study, {685} that magician's laboratory that has produced so much of good, has also often been the alembic of brooding and despair. More than ever before at the opening of the century men felt the vast promises and the vast oppression of thought. New science had burst the old bonds but, withal, the soul still yearned for more. The vanity of knowledge is expressed as nowhere else in Dürer's Melancholia, one of the world's greatest pictures. Surrounded by scientific instruments,—the compass, the book, the balance, the hammer, the arithmetical square, the hour-glass, the bell—sits a woman with wings too small to raise her heavy body. Far in the distance is a wonderful city, with the glory of the Northern Lights, but across the splendid vision flits the little bat-like creature, fit symbol of some disordered fancy of an overwrought mind.
[Sidenote: The Grotesque]
Closely akin to the melancholy of the Renaissance is the love of the grewsome. In Dürer it took the harmless form of a fondness for monstrosities,—rhinoceroses, bearded babies, six-legged pigs and the like. But Holbein and many other artists tickled the emotions of their contemporaries by painting long series known as the Dance of Death, in which some man or woman typical of a certain class, such as the emperor, the soldier, the peasant, the bride, is represented as being haled from life by a grinning skeleton.
Typical of the age, too, was the caricature now drawn into the service of the intense party struggles of the Reformation. To depict the pope or Luther or the Huguenots in their true form their enemies drew them with claws and hoofs and ass's heads, and devil's tails, drinking and blaspheming. Even kings were caricatured,—doubly significant fact!
[Sidenote: Architecture]
As painting and sculpture attained so high a level of maturity in the sixteenth century, one might suppose that architecture would do the same. In truth, {686} however, architecture rather declined. Very often, if not always, each special art-form goes through a cycle of youth, perfection, and decay, that remind one strongly of the life of a man. The birth of an art is due often to some technical invention, the full possibilities of which are only gradually developed. But after the newly opened fields have been exhausted the epigoni can do little but recombine, often in fantastic ways, the old elements; public taste turns from them and demands something new.
[Sidenote: Churches]
So the supreme beauty of the medieval cathedral as seen at Pisa or Florence or Perugia or Rheims or Cologne, was never equalled in the sixteenth century. As the Church declined, so did the churches. Take St. Peter's at Rome, colossal in conception and enormously unequal in execution. With characteristic pride and self-confidence Pope Julius II to make room for it tore down the old church, and other ancient monuments, venerable and beautiful with the hoar of twelve centuries. Even by his contemporaries the architect, Bramante, was dubbed Ruinante! He made a plan, which was started; then he died. In his place were appointed San Gallo and Raphael and Michelangelo, together or in turn, and towers were added after the close of the sixteenth century. The result is the hugest building in the world, and almost the worst proportioned. After all, there is something appropriate in the fact that, just as the pretensions of the popes expanded and their powers decreased, so their churches should become vaster and yet less impressive. St. Peter's was intended to be a marble thunderbolt; but like so many of the papal thunders of that age, it was but a brutum fulmen in the end!
The love for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England portions of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge date from these years, but these portions are grafted on to an older style that really determined them. The greatest glory of English university architecture, the chapel of King's College at Cambridge, was finished in the first years of the century. The noble fan-vaulting and the stained-glass windows will be remembered by all who have seen them.
[Sidenote: Ecclesiastic architecture]