Holbein and His Times

ISBN: 9781440046025 出版年：2018 页码：530 Alfred Woltmann Forgotten Books

That advance of art, at the height of which Holbein stands, has its root and its foundation in the decline of the Middle Ages. This decline was brought about by the endeavours to reconcile Christian ideas with the antique, that is, to reconcile mankind with that earlier stage of culture, from which they had become more and more alienated by the spirit of Christianity, developed during the Middle Ages. Men cast off the fundamental principle of the time, which urged the subjection and denial of nature; the harmony of mind and nature, which in antiquity had formed the basis of thought and life, became anew their aim. Nature was again to assert her rights: this was the impulse pervading all the feelings, the deeds, and the events, which established a new age.