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THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
289
rather frivolous gods of Greece would supplant the object
of Christian worship as had perhaps been the wish of many
representatives of humane learning, like PETER LUDER,
BUSCHIUS, or ULRICH VON HUTTEN. The influence exerted
by humane letters upon the Christian religion consisted
chiefly in the fact that they provoked a comparison with
the supernatural and ethical conceptions of antiquity, and
thus rendered possible a more unbiassed judgment of the
Christian doctrines.
Art owed to antiquity a rich inspiration. The strictly
limited circle of ideas belonging to the Jewish-Christian
legend, which up to this time had almost exclusively formed
material for artists, and which, by its continual repetition,
gradually became monotonous, now received a welcome
enrichment in the mythology of the Greeks and in the heroic
history of Rome. The treatment of form now showed an
unconstrained and bold character contrasting agreeably
with the stiffness and clumsiness of the earlier periods. The
figures—even those borrowed from the transcendental worlds
of religious mysticism—now appeared in nearer sympathy
with the feelings of mankind. Reflecting glory from ideal
conceptions of the good, the beautiful, and the true, they no
longer appeared to the eye as powers darkly threatening