Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 8

violate the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than
Prometheus--one who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the

salvation of the human race depended, to exclude whom from the
sphere of representation in art was the same as confessing the utter
impotence of art to grasp the vital thought of modern faith. It is clear
that the muses of the new age had to haunt Calvary instead of Helicon,
slaking their thirst at no Castalian spring, but at the fount of tears
outpoured by all creation for a stricken God. What Hellas had achieved
supplied no norm or method for the arts in this new service.
From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence
that, if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an
art was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of
intense feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol
of the soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the
fine arts were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of
Christianity--a doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs--and how
far, through their proved inadequacy to perform this task completely,
they weakened the hold of mediaeval faiths upon the modern mind, are
questions to be raised hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm
that, least of all the arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and
its dependence on corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture
had suited the requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to
men who not unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and
who worshipped in their deities the incarnate personality of man made
perfect. But it could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire
of a better world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to
physical appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh;
hope, ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or
hatred for the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the
rounded contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque
tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of
expression. Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate,
the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of
consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting
asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than
sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical
proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect,
more mobile, and more multiform. Colour and shadow, aërial

perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within
the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real
relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find
expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the
play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole
gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. All that drapery by
its partial concealment of the form it clothes, and landscape by its
sympathies with human sentiment, may supply to enhance the passion
of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art, therefore, owing to the
greater variety of means at its disposal, and its greater adequacy to
express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.
To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods
and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and
sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the
noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to
Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul
is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual
character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and its
passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.
The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps
in peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around
whose tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was,
therefore, the proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if
anywhere, the right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone,
and the moulded form be made the symbol of repose, expectant of
restored activity. The greatest sculptor of the modern age was
essentially a poet of Death.
Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the
art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the
stillness of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of
painting was not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic,
began by setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the
Christian Church in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within
the