Tommaso Campanella, in his _Poetica_, looks upon the beautiful as _signum boni_, the ugly as _signum mali_. By goodness, he means Power, Wisdom, and Love. Campanella was still under the influence of the erroneous Platonic conception of the beautiful, but the use of the word _sign_ in this place represents progress. It enabled him to see that things in themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly. Nothing proves more clearly that the Renaissance did not overstep the limits of aesthetic theory reached in antiquity, than the fact that the pedagogic theory of art continued to prevail, in the face of translations of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle and of the diffuse labours expended upon that work. This theory was even grafted upon the _Poetics_, where one is surprised to find it. There are a few hedonists standing out from the general trend of opinion. The restatement of the pedagogic position, reinforced with examples taken from antiquity, was disseminated throughout Europe by the Italians of the Renaissance. France, Spain, England, and Germany felt its influence, and we find the writers of the period of Louis XIV. either frankly didactic, like Le Bossu (1675), for whom the first object of the poet is to instruct, or with La Ménardière (1640) speaking of poetry as "cette science agréable qui mêle la gravité des préceptes avec la douceur du langage." For the former of these critics, Homer was the author of two didactic manuals relating to military and political matters: the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Didacticism has always been looked upon as the Poetic of the Renaissance, although the didactic is not mentioned among the kinds of poetry of that period. The reason of this lies in the fact that for the Renaissance all poetry was didactic, in addition to any other qualities which it might possess. The active discussion of poetic theory, the criticism of Aristotle and of Plato's exclusion of poetry, of the possible and of the verisimilar, if it did not contribute much original material to the theory of art, yet at any rate sowed the seeds which afterwards germinated and bore fruit. Why, they asked with Aristotle, at the Renaissance, does poetry deal with the universal, history with the particular? What is the reason for poetry being obliged to seek verisimilitude? What does Raphael mean by the "certain idea," which he follows in his painting? These themes and others cognate were dealt with by Italian and by Spanish writers, who occasionally reveal wonderful acumen, as when Francesco Patrizio, criticizing Aristotle's theory of imitation, remarks: "All languages and all philosophic writings and all other writings would be poetry, because they are made of words, and words are imitations." But as yet no one dared follow such a clue to the labyrinth, and the Renaissance closes with the sense of a mystery yet to be revealed. III SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES