ABSTRACT
The impetus of the bourgeois individualist dynamic set in motion a cultural process which traced a curve beginning with an abrupt rise and, after reaching its culmination, flattening off gradually. In the economic field the attitude of the bourgeois merchant became increasingly dominant over that of the pugnacious noble. The bourgeois was beginning to be saturated and secure investment alone began to count. The bourgeois who had been engaged in active life, above all in business, had, to begin with, forced the representatives of pure learning on to the periphery of existence. The art of the Early Renaissance, being the art of the rising bourgeoisie, was full of realism, vigour and tension. The development had led from the early bourgeois individualism and its ideal of freedom, to the full bourgeois ideal of harmony and thence to the courtly and chivalrous conventionalities of a new norm which looked back to the old mediaeval chivalry.
