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By Root 2888 0

ways a totalitarian society, in that the Catholic Church permitted no competitors in giving intellectual and spiritual guidance, employing the civic power to suppress heresy by force. In theory it sought to control every aspect of cultural activity. In practice it was often surprisingly liberal or comatose, and artists went on with their own visual and decorative schemes unsupervised. Nudity was not on the whole permitted by public opinion, but an enormous spread of Christian mythology and miraculous happenings, much of it mere folklore without a biblical sanction at all, grew from its roots in popular credulity to provide artists with wondrous subject matter. Toward the close of the Middle Ages, these fantastic and magical tales were intertwined with symbolism and allegory to produce strange visions, as in the works of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), though it is well to realize that Bosch’s appeal to his contemporaries was not the same as to us: Henry III of Nassau bought his Garden of Earthly Delights not so much because he thought it edifying but because he and his guests found it “curious” and funny.3

The painters of the Renaissance benefited greatly from this freedom or laxity. They were of course subject to the detailed directions or whims of their ecclesiastical patrons, who were often persnickety, as many surviving contracts testify. But there was no central control telling artists what to do or what not to do. The popes themselves were sometimes humanists, as witness Pius II (pope 1458–64), or were generally sympathetic to the aims of the Renaissance. That was true of all the popes from Sixtus IV, elected in 1471, to Clement VII, elected in 1523. Bearing in mind that the Renaissance was in one important respect a celebration of the artistic and intellectual virtues of pagan antiquity and their application to modern civilized life, the degree of tolerance was remarkable. That the head of the Roman Catholic Church should not only permit, but commission and pay for, scenes of pagan mythology was taken for granted as a rule, and only a few hardy spirits, like Savonarola, questioned it. His fate can therefore be seen as a victory for Renaissance values, though it is doubtful if Botticelli saw it that way.

However, the broad-mindedness of the church was a feature of its absolute unity and supremacy. When these disappeared or were challenged, a different spirit began to emerge on both sides of the religious divide. The origins of the Reformation, which began to have an impact on events in the 1520s, were complex, but the Renaissance clearly played its part. Among the humanists, the spirit of criticism was the most marked characteristic. In their search for the recovery of an ideal past, they looked hard at everything in the present. They not only identified faulty texts and spurious documents, they also turned a critical eye on institutions and practices. And from the point of view of the intellectuals, the most important institution by far was the church and its controlling machinery in Rome. On Rome and what it permitted, they focused more and more. Just as they delighted to strip an ancient text of its medieval accretions, so they sought to reduce the proliferating practices of the church, which had become nauseous to many educated people, to find the primitive, apostolic and pentecostal church beneath. So the reform movement in the church was broadly similar to the Renaissance itself in its aims and methods, and it is in this sense that Erasmus, greatest of the humanists, was later said to have “laid the egg of the Reformation.”

Since the Reformation was about the removal of medieval accretions to the integrity of primitive Christianity, which included of course the power of the papacy, it was inevitable that the aims of the humanists and those of the Reformers should become confused. The humanists were concerned not only about the way Latin was written, aiming to replace the medieval demotic by classic purity, but about its pronunciation. They were particularly anxious to show how Greek should be promoted, dismissing