THE GREEK TRADITION: ITS COURSE

in the present world and in a glorious past, it
had come to rich fruition. While the achieve-
ments of the Italian Renaissance in sculpture
did not greatly modify a tradition based on
Graeco-Roman remains, its achievements in
painting established a new tradition effective
through the centuries that followed. It is nec-
essary, however, to remember the different ele-
ments in the new tradition — its debt to the
new life of Italy, its debt to the revived human-
ism of Greece, its debt to northern realism, and
its original debt to what it had learned from
Greece through Byzantium.
It is the task of the history of painting to
record the influence of the Renaissance tradi-
tion on modern painting in Europe and America,
as well as the new movements which from
time to time have modified it. In every cen-
tury if not in every generation there have been
classicists, and there have been now realists,
now romanticists, now sentimentalists, now stu-
dents of the science of accurate representation,
now explorers of the field of imagination. The
significant fact, however, is that western paint-
ing has not cut loose from its Hellenic origin.
Renaissance painting, the immediate source of
inspiration for later developments of this art in
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