THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGES in

played a greater part in moving the Venetians to reconquer the Morea in
the ninth decade of the seventeenth century. This seventeenth-century
Frankish reoccupation was, however, followed by secular pilgrimages of
a new-fangled kind of which the thirteenth century had seen no trace;
and the trickle of Late Modern Western connoisseurs of Hellenic art
and students of Hellenic literature on pilgrimage to the homeland of
Hellenism round the shores of the Aegean Sea did not cease to now
when the short interlude of Venetian rule in the Morea was abruptly
terminated by an Ottoman reconquest in A.D 1715.

This difference between the respective cultural sequels to two Frankish
conquests of the Morea that were separated from one another by a
Time-span of nearly five hundred years was due, of course, to the inter-
vening captivation of the Modern Western World as a whole by a
renaissance of Hellenism in the literary and aesthetic spheres which had
been initiated in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; for a
modern tendency towards the secularization of a Western way of life
which had previously been lived within a Christian religious chrysalis
had its effect upon the originally religious institution of Pilgrimage, Since
an early stage in the growth of this institution, pilgrimage-resorts had
tended to become museums of the visual arts; for, in wholly or mainly
illiterate societies, it was a commonplace that pictures and sculptures
were the books of an unlettered majority. In another context1 we have
quoted a passage in the Ion of Euripides in which a party of Athenian
women pilgrims to Delphi are brought on to the stage as sightseers
perambulating the precincts of the temple of Apollo. The interest that
these visitors find in looking at the works of art with which the temenos
is adorned lies in identifying these portrayals of mythical characters and
scenes that are part of the familiar furniture of the spectators* own ima-
ginations. This delight in the visual satisfactions that a pilgrimage-resort
can provide was inherited from naive and illiterate religious pilgrims to
the holy places of Paganism and Higher Religion by sophisticated and
erudite secular pilgrims to relics of the works of Hellenic art, and sites
and scenes of events celebrated in surviving records of Hellenic history,
when a fifteenth-century Italian renaissance of Hellenism had invested
these visible and tangible 'antiquities' with an aura of pseudo-religious
sanctity in the sight of a cultivated ruling minority in a Modern Western
World.

This secularized Modern Western version of an ancient religious in-
stitution took the form of a 'grand tour' that, for the polite society of the
Transalpine and Transmarine countries of a Modern Western World,
found its earliest goal in a Roma Profana from whose long-obscured
virgin countenance a pious Humanism had been gingerly stripping away
Roma Sacra's meretricious enamel mask. A classic example of the genre
was Goethe's Italienische Reise (peregrinabatar A.D. 1786-8).

'In Italy Goethe directed his attention above all to the artistic treasures.
The works of art that captivated him were, however, almost exclusively
confined to the relics of Antiquity and those modern works which, like

1 InV. vi. 521-2.