[Footnote 14: St. Bernard, letters 188th and 189th.]
Following upon these, come next in order all those other great geniuses of the human race, more numerous and prolific than ever in an age which justly calls itself the age of renewal, (de la Renaissance,) and when a thousand favoring circumstances had imparted mighty impulse to the human mind; and they all proceed to arrange themselves in a most harmonious manner around that renovation of Christianity and the church, which is, as it were, (in the picture,) the heart and the vital principle of all the movements of the era. Princes, warriors, statesmen, savants, artists, scholars, jurists, poets, critics, inventors—all have their place in this grand composition.
In the train of the haughty Elizabeth of England, but marching at some distance from that pitiless reformer, as if they desired to leave place for the gory shade of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, "Queen of Scots," appear Thomas Cranmer, More, Burleigh, Essex, Drake, and other gentlemen who represent the English Church. Another group brings together Albert of Brandenburg, William of Orange, Barnevelt, and, at the end, Gustavus Adolphus, evoked a century in advance, it is true, but nevertheless consecrated by his bold deeds of arms and his premature death as a hero—I was about to say as a saint—of the Protestant Church militant.
To warriors and statesmen the painter has given only a secondary place, in a work chiefly designed to glorify intellectual power; and, after the apostles of the Reformation, the honors of this grand piece of canvas are meted out to savants, scholars, and artists.
Bacon of Verulam, with his Novum Organum, makes a part of that group so vigorously designed, where are seen, with Christopher Columbus, Harvey, Vesalius, and Paracelsus. High up in the edifice, and properly placed there as in a sort of observatory, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler are studying the course of the stars, and calculating the laws of their revolutions. So much for science.
Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Campanella, and Nicolas de Cus represent philosophy, with Pico Mirandola, author of the celebrated thesis, De omni re scibili.
Petrarch, with the crown he received at the capitol, faces Shakespeare and the immortal author of Don Quixote, Michael Cervantes. The aged Hans Sachs, the popular poet of the Reformation, is there also, quite at the bottom of the picture, and bending under the weight of age. He represents that literature of the people which henceforward will always hold place growingly by the side of the special literature of the learned. This latter is personated in Reuchlin and Erasmus; and the artist has judged most wisely and properly in placing the latter of these close to Ulrich of Hutten and to Bucer, that is to say, in company with the brutal enemy of monks, and with one of those unfrocked monks whom the Rotterdam critic, with such cutting sarcasm, rallied upon their enthusiasm for a reformation which so generally, like the never-failing conclusion of a comedy, ended in marriage.
The painter has taken care not to forget the personages of the era who ought to be dearer to him than all the others together: Albert Dürer, Peter Vischer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and last, with the inspired gesture of a man who feels himself master of the future, the author of that magnificent discovery which men will henceforth make use of, alike with their reason and their freedom, their intelligence and their speech; here employing it to spread error, to persuade to falsehold, to sow dissensions; elsewhere, using it to serve for the diffusion of truth, the advancement of justice, the amelioration—intellectual, moral, and religious—of the human race: I mean Gutenberg, the immortal inventor of the art of printing. He holds in his hand that sheet, still fresh, which with deep emotion he has seen come forth from the first press, and with which he can speed round the world, crying out with Archimedes, carried away by enthusiasm, "I have found it! I have found it!"
