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. When the ship-load of sacred earth from
the soil of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, unlike any
flower men had seen before, the anemone with its concentric
rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by those who
search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just
such a strange flower was that mythology of the Italian
Renaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions,
two [48] sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story
was regarded as so much imaginative material to be received and
assimilated. It did not come into men's minds to ask curiously of
science, concerning the origin of such story, its primary form and
import, its meaning for those who projected it. The thing sank
into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it of
medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the
Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan