ABSTRACT
The Renaissance man's sense of "metamorphosis", however, was more than even a change of heart: it may be described as an experience intellectual and emotional in content but almost religious in character. In a classical temple—and, consequently, in a Renaissance church—the bases, the shafts and the capitals of the columns are proportioned, more or less, according to the relation between the foot, the body and the head of a normal human being. Mediaeval architecture preaches Christian humility; classical and Renaissance architecture proclaims the dignity of man. Thus the very self-awareness of the Renaissance would have to be accepted as an objective and distinctive "innovation" even if it could be shown to have been a kind of self-deception. It must be admitted that the Renaissance, like a rebellious youth revolting against his parents and looking for support to his grandparents, was apt to deny, or to forget, what it did owe, after all, to its progenitor, the Middle Ages.
