Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 7

and all the artist had to see to, was that this
incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.
Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual nature of

man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion, that judged it
impious to give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial activity
occupied but a subordinate position in its system. It was the life of the
soul, separable from this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when
earth and all that it contains had ended--a life that upon this planet was
continued conflict and aspiring struggle--which the arts, insofar as they
became its instrument, were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship
of a Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored in
no transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most
highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary connection
with beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty and such
strength at any rate were accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could
not but be graceful; a Greek hero was of necessity vigorous. But S.
Stephen might be steadfast to the death without physical charm; S.
Anthony might put to flight the devils of the flesh without muscular
force. It is clear that the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities
of Greek sculpture was not sufficient in this sphere.
Again, the most stirring episodes of the Christian mythology involved
pain and perturbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes
were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls--"For we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and
powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is, therefore, no less
clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so
necessary to consummate sculpture, was here out of place. How could
the Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when every soul, however
insignificant on earth, will play the first part for one moment in an
awful tragedy, be properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and
pleasing? And supposing that the artist should abandon the attempt to
exclude ugliness and discord, pain and confusion, from his
representation of the Dies Irae, how could he succeed in setting forth
by the sole medium of the human body the anxiety and anguish of the
soul at such a time? The physical form, instead of being adequate to the
ideas expressed, and therefore helpful to the artist, is a positive
embarrassment, a source of weakness. The most powerful pictorial or
sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment, when compared with the
pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty conscience, pangs whereof

words may render some account, but which can find no analogue in
writhings of the limbs or face, must of necessity be found a failure. Still
more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought into another region,
is it for the figurative arts to approach the Christian conception of God
in His omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself, the central figure of the
Christian universe, the desired of all nations, in whom the Deity
assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit subject for such
art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of His incarnation
brought Him indeed within the proper sphere of the fine arts; but the
religious idea which He represents removed Him beyond the reach of
sculpture. This is an all-important consideration. It is to this that our
whole argument is tending. Therefore to enlarge upon this point will
not be useless.
Christ is specially adored in His last act of love on Calvary; and how
impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the requirements of
strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing the passion of S.
Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann
and Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified
generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the
negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of
comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible
omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that
"ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven,
whose feet were clothed with stars"--it is all this that gives their force
and pathos to these stanzas:
Omnis vigor atque viror Hinc recessit; non admiror: Mors apparet in
inspectu, Totus pendens in defectu, Attritus aegrâ macie.
Sic affectus, sic despectus, Propter me sic interfectus, Peccatori tam
indigno Cum amoris in te signo Appare clarâ facie[3].
We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus
upon Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the
anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to