Fra Bartolommeo | Page 3

these periods from its rise, how truly this similitude of
the dawn of day is carried out. See at the first streak of light how dim,
stiff, and soulless all things appear! Trees and objects bear precisely the
relation to their own appearance in broad daylight as the wooden
Madonnas of the Byzantine school do to those of Raphael.
Next, when the sun--the true light--first appears, how it bathes the sea
and the hills in an ethereal glory not their own! What fair liquid tints of
blue, and rose, and glorious gold! This period which, in art, began with
Giotto and ended with Botticelli, culminated in Fra Angelico, who
flooded the world of painting with a heavenly spiritualism not material,
and gave his dreams of heaven the colours of the first pure rays of
sunshine.
But as the sun rises, nature takes her real tints gradually. We see every
thing in its own colour; the gold and the rose has faded away with the
truer light, and a stern realism takes its place. The human form must be
expressed, in all its solidity and truth, not only in its outward semblance,

but the hidden soul must be seen through the veil of flesh. And in this
lies the reason of the decline; only to a few great masters it was given
to reveal spirituality in humanity--the others could only emulate form
and colour, and failed.
It is impossible to contemplate art apart from religion; as truly as the
celestial sun is the revealer of form, so surely is the heavenly light of
religion the first inspirer of art.
Where would the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Etruscan paintings and
sculptures have been but for the veneration of the mystic gods of the
dead, which both prompted and preserved them?
What would Greek sculpture have been without the deified
personifications of the mysterious powers of nature which inspired it?
and it is the fact of the pagan religion being both sensuous and realistic
which explains the perfection of Greek art. The highest ideal being so
low as not to soar beyond the greatest perfection of humanity, was thus
within the grasp of the artist to express. Given a manly figure with the
fullest development of strength; a female one showing the greatest
perfection of form; and a noble man whose features express dignity and
mental power;--the ideal of a Hercules, a Venus, and a Jupiter is fully
expressed, and the pagan mind satisfied. The spirit of admirers was
moved more by beauty of form than by its hidden significance. In the
great Venus, one recognises the woman before feeling the goddess.
As with their sculpture, without doubt it was also with painting. Mr.
Symonds, in his _Renaissance of the Fine Arts_, speaks of the Greek
revival as entirely an age of sculpture; but the solitary glance into the
more perishable art of painting among the Greeks, to be seen at Cortona,
reveals the exquisite perfection to which this branch was also brought.
It is a painting in encaustic, and has been used as a door for his oven by
the contadino who dug it up--yet it remains a marvel of genius. The
subject is a female head--a muse, or perhaps only a portrait; the
delicacy and mellowness of the flesh tints equal those of Raphael or
Leonardo, and a lock of hair lying across her breast is so exquisitely
painted that it seems to move with her breath. The features are of the
large-eyed regular Greek type, womanly dignity is in every line, but it
is an essentially pagan face--the Christian soul has never dawned in
those eyes! With this before us, we cannot doubt that Greek art found
its expression as much in colour as in form and that the same religion

inspired both.
In an equal degree Renaissance Art has its roots in Christianity; but the
religion is deeper and greater, and has left art behind.
The early Christians must have felt this when they expressed
everything in symbols, for these are merely suggestive, and allow the
imagination full play around and beyond them; they are mere
stepping-stones to the ideal which exists but is as yet inexpressible.
"Myths and symbols always mark the dawn of a religion, incarnation
and realism its full growth." So after a time when the first vague
wonder and ecstasy are over, symbols no longer content people; they
want to bring religion home to them in a more tangible form, to
humanize it, in fact. From this want it arises that nature next to religion
inspires art, and finally takes its place. For it follows as a matter of
course that as art is a realistic interpreter of the spiritual, so it is more
easy to follow nature than spirituality, nature being the outward or
realistic expression of