The main motives supplied to art by mediaeval traditions and humanistic enthusiasm were worked out.
Nor was this all.

The Renaissance had created a critical spirit which penetrated every branch of art and letters.

It was not possible to advance further on the old lines; yet painters, sculptors, architects, and poets of the rising generation had before their eyes the masterpieces of their predecessors, in their minds the precepts of the learned.

All alike were rendered awkward and self-conscious by the sense of laboring at a disadvantage, and by the dread of academical censorship.
In truth, this critical spirit, which was the final product of the Renaissance in Italy, favored the development of new powers in the nation: it hampered workers in the elder spheres of art, literature, and scholarship; but it set thinkers upon the track of those investigations which we call scientific.

I shall endeavor, in a future chapter, to show how the Italians were now upon the point of carrying the ardor of the Renaissance into fresh fields of physical discovery and speculation, when their evolution was suspended by the Catholic Reaction.