Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/83

Rh pressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant a subtler sense of originality, the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods and manner of apprehension: it is what we call expression carried to its highest intensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer still in art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet at bottom perhaps it is the characteristic which alone makes works in the imaginative and moral order really worth having at all. It is because the works of the artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in an unmistakeable degree that one is anxious to know all that can be known about them and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.