“...the depth-experience and idea of extension that underlies it [the Renaissance] is not the Apollonian un-spatial and self-contained body but the Gothic field... However recessive the backgrounds are, they exist. Yet here again there was the fullness of light, the clarity of atmosphere, the great noon-calm, of the South.... Though fields of space were painted, they were put, not as an existence unbounded and like music ever striving into the depths, but as sensuously definable.  Space was given a sort of bodiliness and order in plane layers, and drawing, sharpness of outline, definition of surface were studied with a care that seemingly approached the Hellenic ideal.”

 

“Yet there was always this difference, that Florence depicted space perspectively as singular in contrast with things as plural, whereas Athens presented things as separate singulars in contrast to general nothingness.”