religion, and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking
fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as
simpler painters had introduced there other products of the earth,
birds or flowers, while he has given to that Madonna herself
much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive
"Mighty Mother."

This picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to the art
of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della
Mirandola, an actual person, and that is why the figure of Pico is
so attractive. He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of
one's self, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books,
although we know already that the actual solution proposed in
them will satisfy us as little as perhaps it satisfied him. It is said
that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once paid a great
sum for a collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out
to be forgeries; and [49] the story might well stand as a parable of
all he ever seemed to gain in the way of actual knowledge. He
had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, and
hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than
because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in
knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's
ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made dim. And
so, while his actual work has passed away, yet his own qualities
are still active, and himself remains, as one alive in the grave,
caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his biographer describes him, and
with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti rubore interspersa, as with
the light of morning upon it; and he has a true place in that group
of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with their
names, he is a true humanist. For the essence of humanism is