These great painters of the Renaissance, touched by the humanistic spirit abroad in the world of their time and with the old Greek ideas of the place of man as the very centre of { 70} the universe, created a new way of looking at men in their relation to the world around them. They Hellenized their vision of men and stamped it upon the culture and civilization of their time. Berenson has suggested in his "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance" that they thus influenced not only men's way of looking at men, but actually to some degree transformed men themselves by the mirror they held before them. He said: [Footnote 7]
"The way of visualizing, affected by the artists, the humanists and the ruling classes, could not help becoming universal. Who had the power to break through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things, to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented. Nor was this all. Owing to this subtle and most irresistible of all forces, the unconscious habits of imitation, people soon ended either by actually resembling the new ideals or, at all events, earnestly endeavoring to be like them. The result has been that, after five centuries of constant imitation of a type first presented by Donatello and Masaccio, we have, as a race, come to be more like that type than we ever were before. For there is no more curious truth than the trite statement that nature imitates art. Art teaches us not only what to see, but what to be."
[Illustration: VAN DER WEYDEN, MATER DOLOROSA]
While it is the custom to think of our period, Columbus' Century, as the time of the Renaissance, owing its inspiration to the rebirth of Greek ideas into the modern world, it must not be forgotten that quite apart from this there was a "great wind of the spirit" of art blowing abroad at this epoch. The Renaissance is thought of as Italian, but the Teutonic countries exhibit in Columbus' Century a great artistic development at the beginning quite uninfluenced by the New Learning that came from the Greek rebirth. Painting, sculpture, architecture and the arts and crafts, all reached a climax of expression in the Teutonic countries, especially in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the evidence for which is to be seen in the monuments preserved for us particularly in the Low Countries and in Southern Germany.