unity of art and knowledge which had been affirmed by the
great pathfinders of the Renaissance and which had reached its
culmination in the art of Piero della Francesca.

The fact is of course that on the political and religious planes
a great future lay in store for this syncretism of art and know-
ledge, once it had been incorporated in the humanist program
gradually drawn up and put into effect by the Church after the
healing of the Great Schism ( 1378-1417), because that program
at last supplied historical justification for the Christian faith by
embracing Antiquity as its own and proudly pointing to it as
the natural philosophy of man, the providential prelude to
Christ's revelation of the absolute truth.

But this grandiose, systematic synthesis of history, nature
and faith, which was to form the ideological basis of Raphael's
classicism, presupposed political conditions very different from
those which actually materialized at Florence in the time of
Lorenzo the Magnificent. It is obviously possible to give a
political interpretation to the soul-struggles of Michelangelo
which came so dramatically to a head in the early years of the
Cinquecento, and to read into them an ideological contrast
between Rome and Florence. But the first signs of this contrast
can be discerned several decades earlier in Botticelli's brief,
unsuccessful stay in Rome and in Leonardo's undeniable failure
at the Vatican.

Botticelli had gone to Rome with political and religious
ideals of his own, clearly expressed in his Sistine frescos, which
however had no lasting effect on the artistic and religious
policies of the Church. But from that time on his painting
evolved like a dialectical argument worked out under the
unrelaxing, reciprocal tension of religious and artistic problems
--the same dialectics, the same tension we find in Savonarola's
sermons, to which Botticelli was anything but indifferent. As
for Leonardo, he worked on far from Florence and Rome in

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