Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 6

scenes of sacred history, and his devotion be
quickened by lively images of the passion of our Lord. Spirit should
converse with spirit, through no veil of symbol, but through the
transparent medium of art, itself instinct with inbreathed life and

radiant with ideal beauty. The body and the soul, moreover, should be
reconciled; and God's likeness should be once more acknowledged in
the features and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of art; and this
promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of the
fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of
ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival
of the first picture investing religious emotion with aesthetic charm.
But in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the
arts on the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own--the region
of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a
world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was
materialised to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit, indeed,
spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh
spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form. The incarnation promised by
the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought
down to earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself
was heavenly.
At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main
questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially
adapted to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth
century. The second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion
from the expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic
form.
When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle
Ages by the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth,
demanded a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had
therefore never fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an
aesthetic point of view between the religious notions of the Greeks and
those which Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith,
hope, and charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and
the Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the
height and depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny
before the throne of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid
and solemn, transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying
the mind away to an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained

a new reality by virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite
Beyond, the modern arts in their infancy were thrust. There was
nothing finite here or tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish
foreheads or the swiftness of a young man's limbs, no simple
idealisation of natural delightfulness. The human body, which the
figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of their expression, had
ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased to be the true and
adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the artist. At best it
could be taken only as the symbol of some inner meaning, the shrine of
an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a lamp of alabaster owes
its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than half conceals, the light
transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.
In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks
recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to
be incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities
of the Greek mythology were limited to the conditions of natural
existence: they were men and women of a larger mould and freer
personality; less complex, inasmuch as each completed some one
attribute; less thwarted in activity, inasmuch as no limit was assigned to
exercise of power. The passions and the faculties of man, analysed by
unconscious psychology, and deified by religious fancy, were invested
by sculpture with appropriate forms, the tact of the artist selecting
corporeal qualities fitted to impersonate the special character of each
divinity. Nor was it possible that, the gods and goddesses being what
they were, exact analogues should not be found for them in idealised
humanity. In a Greek statue there was enough soul to characterise the
beauty of the body, to render her due meed of wisdom to Pallas, to
distinguish the swiftness of Hermes from the strength of Heracles, or to
contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with the abundance of
Aphrodite's charms. At the same time the spirituality that gave its
character to each Greek deity, was not such that, even in thought, it
could be dissociated from corporeal form. The Greeks thought their
gods as incarnate persons;