The Art of the Renaissance (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Art of the Renaissance Lorenzo Valla in proclaiming the perfections of the Latin language: 'the glory of Latinity was allowed to decay in rust and mould. And many, indeed, and varied are the opinions of wise men on how'this happened. I neither accept nor reject any of these, daring only to declare soberly that those arts which are most closely related to the liberal arts, the arts of painting, sculpture, modelling, and archi tecture, had degenerated for so long and so greatly and had almost: died with letters themselves, and that in this age they have been) aroused and come to life again, so greatly increased is the number of good artists and men of letters who now ¿ourish. Thus, the Renaissance was thought of both as a revival of good Latin literature and of the figurative arts. One reason for, the apparently overwhelm ing importance which the men of the age attached to good Latinity was, of course, the fact that it was the common tongue of all educated men - a tiny proportion of the population in any country, another, less obvious, reason was the fact that the new European states were coming into existence, some, like France and England, with central ized monarchies, and others, like most of the Italian states, indepen dent merchant communities. These states needed a professional administrative class, well grounded in Roman Law, which was still a living thing. They were inevitably exponents of the new, lay, _ learning, which, like the professional studies of the clergy, was based on Latin. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.