There are few matters regarding art more worthy of consideration than the narrowness of the limits that bound human invention: or, to speak more exactly, we should say the simplicity of the laws and principles in obedience to which the imaginations of men are exercised. The return of the painters, sculptors, and architects to the old types of classical art after the reign of the Gothic seems at first sight as if in the arts there could be nothing new under the sun: as if the imagination, so fertile in creation during many centuries since the establishment of Christianity, had been utterly worked out and come to an end, and that there was nothing left but to repeat and copy what had been done ages before. There is, however, in reality more connection between classic and mediæval art than appears on the surface, and although all the great masters of the revival studied eagerly such remains of antique art as were discovered in Italy during the early years of the renaissance, they only came into direct contact with or absolute imitation of those models occasionally; and the works of that age have a grace that is peculiarly their own, and an inventiveness in painting and sculpture, if not in architecture, that seems, when we look at such cities as Venice and Florence, inexhaustible. The renaissance began in Italy many years before the year 1500. Most changes, indeed, of manners or arts which are designated by any century are perhaps more correctly dated twenty years before or after its beginning, and in the notices which we are here putting together we are compelled to make divisions of time occasionally overlap each other.