Norm and Form Quotes

“Propaganda, as we know to our cost, is the art of imposing a pattern on reality, and to impose it so successfully that the victim can no longer conceive it in different terms. Such a pattern will be the more likely to exert its spell the deeper it is rooted in tradition, the more affinity it has with the typical nightmares and dreams of mankind. The Messianic Rulder who brings back the Golden Age is precisely such a perennial dream, and we have seen that it did exert the spell on subsequent generations who saw the teeming life of the real Quattrocento fall into this deceptively simple configuration.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: On the Renaissance 1

“[I]n one sense Coismo did represent such a new era — the uomo disarmato without ancestors and without claim to to war-like prowess, indeed even without overt claim to power, would make the poet cast about for some extraordinary formula. And was their feeling quite unjustified, in the face of such a person, that the age of iron had begun to yield to the age of gold — albeit in a slightly different sense? To quote Professor Jacob's relazione on that very point: "The Europe of chivalry had gone, the armies were paind and the risks of war calculated in financial terms." No wonder that Cosimo, in Giovanni Avogadro's eulogy, is made to say: "Si num vincunt, hercle est fas vincere nobis" — "If money can conquer, by jingo we shall". It is a thoroughly unheroic picture. But this is precisely the aspect of the Renaissance which Professor C. Backuis so aptly characterized as "civism".”
― E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: On the Renaissance 1