In fact, we may say that, from the second half of the
sixteenth century, humanism as an independent intellectual interest
slowly but steadily declined. Nevertheless, it was not lost, for it was
merged with other interests, and with them has been preserved ever
since.
Humanism, whose seed was sown by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and
whose fruit was plucked by Erasmus in the sixteenth, still lives in
higher education throughout Europe and America. The historical
"humanities"--Latin, Greek, and history--are still taught in college
and in high school. They constitute the contribution of the dominant
intellectual interest of the sixteenth century.
ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Humanism and the Renaissance of Art]
The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which,
as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward
life of its devotees--in ransacking monasteries for lost manuscripts
scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously
imitating antique behavior--but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided
development of art.
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