I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things
great, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it
actually achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the true
method of effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentiment
with the imagery, the legends, the theories about the world, of pagan
poetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible reconciliation was
an imaginative one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained in
Christian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artistic
reconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart.
Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or the other, whether they
were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the
new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on the
dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct
charm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their own
sake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of its
own.
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