It is at this point, as we know, that the Renaissance departed far from antiquity.

Even Petrarch thought in the ancient (and medieval) way: representatives of any "handicraft", any ?????, "mechanici", are excluded from culture, from the world where books are. "What will happen," he pathetically exclaims in the same pamphlet, "if men of manual labor (mechanici) take up pens (calamosarripiunt)?"30 Every philosopher, every poet, every learned man must protest against such a terrifying prospect. Vestra res agitur!

In order to appreciate the revolution brought about by the Renaissance, it is sufficient to compare the place occupied by Vitruvius, also a mechanicus, who took up the pen!, in relation to the culture of his own time and in the culture of modern Europe, from Alberti to Vignola and beyond.

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Such is the contrast of tone in which the names of painters, sculptors, and architects are introduced in ancient texts on the history of art, and, say, in Vasari (whose work in other respects provides a fairly close analogy to these texts). For example, Pliny the Elder, who speaks of artists on an ancient scale very respectfully, begins his biographical rubrics as follows: "... In the ninetieth Olympiad there lived Aglaophon, Cephisodorus, Friel, Evenor..."33, "... In the fourth year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, Zeuxis of Heraclea entered the gates of art that were now open..."34; "... His contemporaries and rivals were Timanthus, Androcides, Eupompus, Parrhasius..."36; "... Parrhasius, born in Ephesus, did many things there..."36 Pliny states that all the painters who were, are, and will be surpassed by Apelles37, as all sculptors were surpassed by Phidias38; This seems to be said quite strongly, not without rhetorical pathos, but it only marks the superiority of a certain person in a certain kind of activity, and in no way the superiority of this kind of activity itself among others. The appearance of Apelles or Phidias is an event in the fate of art; It does not follow from anything that this event is in the fate of mankind. On the contrary, Vasari describes Michelangelo's apparition not merely as a triumph of art, but as a reconciliation of heaven and earth, of God and man: "The most benevolent Ruler of heaven has turned His compassionate eyes to earth." Such a quasi-theological tone is very characteristic of Vasari: for example, Leonardo da Vinci was, in his words, "truly pre-literate and celestial (celeste)"40.

In this regard, the use of the epithet divinus "divine" is important. In ancient usage, this epithet was normally applied to the famous masters of the art of the word. For Cicero, for example, Servilius Galba is "divine in speech" (divinus homo in dicendo),41 and Crassus even "god in speeches," at least according to Quintus Mucius Scaevola, one of the participants in the dialogue.42 Cicero pathetically recalls Crassus's last speech in the Senate as "the swan word of a divine man" (cycnea divini hominis vox et oratio).43 The eloquence of Cicero himself is "divine" in the assessment of Quintilian44; the irony of Cicero's speech "In Defense of Lygarius"46 is specifically "divine"; the same Quintilian speaks of "the divine splendor of Theophrastus's speech".46 The "divine" orator and the "divine" poet (the latter, for example, in Horace) are

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it is next to the "divine" sage48 and the "divine" Caesar49; but the "divine" artist next to them is invisible, he is not visible. The situation is different at the end of the Renaissance. Even during Michelangelo's lifetime, everyone was so accustomed to calling him "divine" that Aretino can already play on this cliché in his notorious letter to Buonarroti of November 1545, where he, after a flood of reproaches and denunciatory innuendos, suddenly concludes conciliatorily: "I only wanted to show you that if you are 'divine' (divino = di vino = 'wine'), then I am not a 'waterman' (d'acqua)."

The ancients composed epigrams in abundance for works of art - only, as a rule, not for the artists themselves. In the "Palatine Anthology" there are 42 epigrams on the "Cow" of Myron and 13 epigrams on "Aphrodite Anadyomene" of Praxiteles - but not a single epigram on Myron or Praxiteles! And now, in the Renaissance, Poliziano himself, the first poet of the Quattrocento, composes an epigram on Giotto's tomb in Saita Maria del Fiore, beginning with the words:

Ille ego sum, per quern pictura extincta revixit...

("I am the one through whom the faded painting came to life"51)

One must feel all the incomparable weight and solemnity of the Latin ille in order to appreciate such a beginning, which rehashes at least two famous beginnings: first, the apocryphal, but at that time attributed to Virgil, lines prefaced by the Aeneid:

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avena

Carmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi