The name is absent

Dante and the Renaissance 211

poet. A few lines of sibylline prophecy had made it pos-
sible to enroll him among the witnesses of Christianity. He
had become a magician, almost a saint: horoscopes were
drawn from his works. Dante, therefore, was not looking
forward, but only giving expression to the deep-rooted sen-
timent of his race, when he hailed Virgil as his guide, his
master, and his lord.

There is, indeed, nothing in Dante’s classical scholarship
that is not of the type current in medieval Italy. The au-
thors he knew well, Virgil, Ovid, Statius, were universal
favorites. He made no effort to add anything to the stand-
ard list: he was not yearning for lost treasures. The clas-
sical canon satisfied his unquestioning faith as fully as the
scriptural canon. For the Renaissance to be conceivable,
the spirit of Petrarch was first required: a deep sense that
antiquity had to be recovered. Too secure in what he pos-
sessed, Dante could not be among the seekers.

His worship of ancient Rome assumed, as we know, a
political aspect. There is for him a sacred halo about the
empire. Brutus and Cassius share with Judas the ultimate
horror of punishment; to kill Cæsar is almost a deicide.
Trajan, under whom the empire reached its perfection, is
saved. We are all familiar with the wonderful flight of the
Eagle and the splendid speech of Justinian. In this Dante
was passionately clutching a vanishing shade—the dream of
universal unity which had set the sacerdoce against the em-
pire. Of this purely medieval conception there is hardly
any trace in the works of the humanists or in the poems of
the cinque-cento.

One of the most impressive characteristics of the Renais-
sance is the full development of splendid personalities.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most illustrious example of many-

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