Zeus-Sabazios

Ancient busts such as this one were often displayed on high shelves and formed a focal point of a scholar's study. Humanist Renaissance scholars, most so in Italy, were keen to link themsleves with the intellectual traditions of Greece and Rome, and paint themsleves as the guardians and inheritors of long-forgotten Classical schools of thought, though in fact 'the Ancients' had been always been held in the highest regard right through the entire medieval period, and right across Europe. But Classical heritage and traditions were always stronger and its influence more obviously visible in Italian art than the rest of Christendom. The influence of ancient Roman and Greek traditions on art, architecture, learning, politics and military affairs, costume and even the self-identity of scholars, noblemen and princes, grew stonger, more obvious, more a matter of imitation than homage and regard, and also more sustained and irreversable once the 'Renaissance' unfolded.