To the naturalism which became gradually prevalent in most Italian schools after the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was, in the fifteenth, added another principle of antagonism to mystic feeling. In purist nomenclature it has been denominated paganism, but it seems to consist of paganism and classicism. By the former is to be understood that fashion for the philosophy, morality, literature, and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, which, introduced from the recovered authors of antiquity, was assiduously cultivated by the Medici in their lettered but sceptical court, until it left a stamp on the literature and art of Italy not yet effaced. Under its influence, the vernacular language was neglected, or cramped into obsolete models; dead tongues monopolised students; the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato divided men, clouding their faith, and warping their morals from Christian standards; the beauty of holiness yielded before an ideal of form; and that unction which had purified the conceptions and guided the pencils of devotional painters, evaporated as they strove to master the technical excellences of the new manner. To the maxims and principles of revived pagan antiquity, the philosophic Schlegel has traced the selfish policy and morals of Italian tyrants and communities; but it seems easier to detect their fatal tendency in painting and sculpture than upon statecraft and manners. Classicism, as here used, means that innovation of antique taste in art which arose out of renewed interest in the picturesque ruins of Rome, in her mighty recollections, in the excavation of her precious sculptures, and which imparted to pictorial representations sometimes a hard and plastic treatment, sometimes ornamental architecture, bas-reliefs, or grotesques. By paganism a blighting poison was infused through the spirit of art, while classicism has often ennobled the work and enriched its details, without injury to its sentiment. To schools such as those of Florence and Padua, wherein nature or classic imitation prevailed, there belonged the materialism of facts, the severity of definite forms.[*112] These qualities obtained favour from men of mundane pursuits and literary tastes; from citizens greedy after gainful commerce and devoted to political intrigue; or from princes who patronised, and pedants who deciphered, long forgotten, but at length reviving lore. The "new manner," as it was called, had, in Michael Angelo, a supporter whose mighty genius lent to its solecisms an irresistible charm. Yet against such innovations protests were long occasionally recorded. An anonymous writer, in 1549, mentions a _Pietà_, said to have been designed by "Michael Angelo Buonarroti, that inventor of filthy trash, who adheres to art without devotion. Indeed, all the modern painters and sculptors, following the like Lutheran [that is, impious] caprices now-a-days, neither paint nor model for consecrated churches anything