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Show An Editor's Outlook ; Birth of Modern Man Jerusalem, fired with the magni-ficance magni-ficance of the East. Europe developed devel-oped a taste for pepper and spices. It was inevitable that the newborn new-born commerce would expand and that new ideas would seize the European mind. The Renaissance would have been born without Florence. BUT NEVER so suddenly and so magnificently. The greatest of the bankers were the Medicis. By the early 1400's word began to spread among the groping artists of Italy that there was always a place at the Medici table. If the artist were good there'd be an occasional bag of gold. If he were very good there'd be a villa, co, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo four-ished four-ished in Florence. Ghiberti spent half his life on the bronze doors of the Baptistry. Cellini wrought wonders in gold and silver. Giotto raised tall towers and Brunelleschi rediscovered the art of building domes. You stand below the David. Da-vid. You climb the Campanile. You stare at the walls of the Uf-fizi Uf-fizi and the Pitti Palace. Here was an explosion of genius. BUT FLORENCE was much more than art. A century before the artists came Dante wrote the First classic in a vernacular ton gue and thus, with Chaucer D J literature out of the hands oh Latin scholars. Machiavelli ' posed his "Prince" for lorr " the Second. It reads today It-. -recipe for rascality, but it serious treatise on the art of g ; ernment as opposed to the tr. -ties of the sword, the whip i-s the rack. " ': Like waves flowing out far . cast stone the stirrings ol fl ence washed up on distant ste: Lorenzo the Magnificent te;-; with humanism, and two ceifc later the cult of Reason ros:s. France and began to cloud j ' king-loyalty of the American : e onists. Modern research is a c; ;. cendant of Leonardo's experr -tation. Galileo, who knew F ence well, was forced to re- ( his heresies, but the science astronomy awaited the day : questioned the Aristotelian k. that the universe revolved arc. the Earth. : Here 500 years ago Mtx. these massive walls and in t r few square miles of te',: streets Western Man shook T ' the despair, the past-worship?: to the death-preoccupation of i ; Dark Ages. Florence was te-i She was energy, curiosity hope. And by the time herE; went out she had set the world ; fire- 4 By JENKIN LLOYD JONES Paolo Uccello sat along time at his window that day watching the peasant women, the beggars, the soldiers and the gentry pass along the Via Calzaioli. The year was 1425. EVER SINCE there had been streets men had watched other human beings pass along them. But there is a difference between watching and observing. And Paolo Uccello was this day an observer. He was seeing what all men had seen and what no man had discovered. We call it perspective. per-spective. Holding his hand a few inches before his eyes Paola observed that worshippers coming out of the Duomo were two knuckles high, that as they crossed the piazza pi-azza they grew to the length of a whole hand, but as they moved away toward the Ponte Vecchio they diminished until upon turning turn-ing the corner they measured less than a fingernail. HE TURNED to his canvas. He resketched the background of angels, an-gels, making them much smaller. He redrew the allegorical road, making the far end much narrower narrow-er than the near end. He stepped back and scanned the results with growing excitement. Then he began be-gan mixing his colors. You cannot say, of course, that Paolo Uccello a painter known only to art scholars ushered in the modern age. But you can say that the modern age awaited the arrival of men capable of freeing themselves of old errors. It awaited await-ed men who were willing to question ques-tion and test and explore. And because, for a brief hour, an amazing concentration of such men lived and worked in Florence Flor-ence you can say in truth that ' here the Dark Ages were shattered shat-tered by the first great light beams of realistic art and scien-. scien-. tific thought. Here was born the Renaissance. THE GREATNESS of Florence began in honesty. As early as 1262 the Florentine bankers started issuing letters of credit. No longer was it necessary for a man to carry his wealth with him on the brigand-infested roads. He merely tucked away a letter that made a promise. And, because the promises of the Florentine bankers bank-ers were good, trade, which had been in paralysis in Western Europe since the fall of Rome, began be-gan to revive. Some historians find the beginning begin-ning of the Renaissance in the Crusades. The Crusades shook Europe out of its lethargy. Young men whose ancestors had never traveled beyond their vallage came back wearing the cross of |