Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 5

the arts, true to their own principles,
eliminated from both traditions the more strictly human elements, and
expressed them in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The
brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary
fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic
orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan

sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the
double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of
painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of
thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind.
Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful co-agent in
the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith its
methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid
upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the
subordination of classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law of
loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences
between paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of
that humanity wherein both find their harmony.
This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we
may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as
distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to
take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that,
while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting
became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of
figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting.
The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape
from the dead hands of the former. Nor had the tradition that connected
art with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious
ideas had been substituted for the old ones. The late Roman and
Byzantine manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian
genius dwindled into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and
lifeless form to Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feeling
subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it
now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression. It was
destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in painting.
During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening
of the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols
and material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the
wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency,
evoked the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such
concrete actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible

divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of
Loreto, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest
sentiments of aweful adoration. Like Thomas, they could not be
contented with believing; they must also touch and handle. At the same
time, in apparent contradistinction to this demand for things of sense as
signs of super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew
more imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm
of spiritual rapture. For the figurative arts there was no true place in
either of these regions. Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the
grosser superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances
of the Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of
theology. Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion,
could have found but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by
a man of genius. A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of
curing disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only
for its beauty or its truth to life. We all know that wunderthätige Bilder
sind meist nur schlechte Gemälde. In architecture alone, the mysticism
of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their
yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and
places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture was essentially a
medieval art. The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the
quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a
novel way of apprehending the old substance of religious feeling; for
comprehension of these arts implies delight in things of beauty for their
own sake, a sympathetic attitude towards the world of sense, a new
freedom of the mind produced by the regeneration of society through
love.
The mediaeval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters
began their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set
forth in beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity. The eyes
of the worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to
contemplate: his imagination should be helped by the dramatic
presentation of the