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works of art to be placed in churches or other religious buildings. It was not, strictly speaking, an act of iconoclasm, since it was prospective, not retrospective. Few existing images were removed, as had already been done in countless buildings controlled by Protestant zealots. But it put a stop to any future work of that kind and thus robbed religious artists of one of their chief sources of subject matter. It was the end of the Middle Ages, abolishing at a stroke the swarming inventiveness and labyrinthine imagination that had produced so much delightful art, both in the Gothic mode and indeed in Renaissance works, where Christian and pagan mythology intertwined. It affected not only the great masters working in the big cities but also—and perhaps more—the humble artist-craftsmen of the smaller towns and villages, whose wall paintings, bench ends and shrine figures had been encyclopedias of Christian folklore, now all forbidden.

Even more influential were the more positive doctrines of the Counter-Reformation, which the final session of Trent formalized. In response to the Protestant cult of the vernacular—of simplicity, austerity and puritanism—the Catholic Church, after its earlier defensive and guilt-ridden response, decided to embark on a much bolder policy of emphasizing the spectacular. With the Jesuits in the vanguard, churches and other religious buildings were to be ablaze with light, clouded with incense, draped in lace, smothered in gilt, with huge altars, splendid vestments, sonorous organs and vast choirs, and a liturgy purged of medieval nonsense but essentially triumphalist in its content and amplitude. The artists— painters, sculptors, architects, makers of church furniture and windows—were to fall into line, scrapping the folklore and mythology indeed, but portraying the story of Christianity, the history of the church, the faith of its martyrs and the destruction of its enemies with all the power and realism they could command. Thus Rome defied the Protestants and bade the Puritans do their worst. Catholicism would reply to simplicity and primitive austerity with all the riches and color and swirling lines and glitter in its repertoire, adding new ones as artists could create them.

Whatever the spiritual merits of this policy, it was undoubtedly popular in southern Europe at least, and in the closing decades of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to regain some lost ground. However, the Counter-Reformation approach to art was a formula for what would later be called the Baroque. It was music in the ears of ambitious young painters like Caravaggio. But it tolled a requiem for the Renaissance, or rather the attitudes it stood for. The movement was already a spent force anyway, and by the 1560s and 1570s it was dead, as dead as Michelangelo and Titian, its last great masters. But Renaissance forms lingered on. They had become part of the basic repertoire of European arts, subsumed in the Baroque and in Rococo, ready to spring to life again in the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. They are with us still. In many ways the ideals of those times are part of our permanent cultural heritage, as are the matchless works of art and the enduring monuments those rich and fruitful times produced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature on every aspect of the Renaissance is endless, and I confine myself here to books in my own library that I have consulted for this work. First and foremost the Grove Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (thirty-four vols., London, 1996), especially for dates, spelling of proper names and whereabouts of paintings and sculptures. It is particularly valuable for its bibliographies. I have also used the New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie (twenty vols., London, 1995) for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music. Older general books include J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in Germany in 1860), and Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1953). The works of Kenneth Clark are also