Gradually, with the revival of learning, artists were free to give greater importance to secular subjects, and an element of worldliness, and even of immorality, invaded the realm of art as it invaded the realms of life and literature.
This was an era of change in all departments of life. Chivalry, the great "poetic lie," died with feudalism, and the relations between men and women became more natural and reasonable than in the preceding centuries. Women were liberated from the narrow sphere to which they had been relegated in the minstrel's song and poet's rhapsody, but as yet neither time nor opportunity had been given them for the study and development which must precede noteworthy achievement.
Remarkable as was the fifteenth century for intellectual and artistic activity, it was not productive in its early decades of great genius in art or letters. Its marvellous importance was apparent only at its close and in the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the works of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and their followers emphasized the value of the progressive attainments of their predecessors.
The assertion and contradiction of ideas and theories, the rivalries of differing schools, the sweet devotion of Fra Angelico, the innovations of Masolino and Masaccio, the theory of perspective of Paolo Uccello, the varied works of Fabriano, Antonello da Messina, the Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, the Bellini, and their contemporaries, culminated in the inimitable painting of the Cinquecento—in works still unsurpassed, ever challenging artists of later centuries to the task of equalling or excelling them.
