Renaissance in Italy Volume 3 | Page 9

scope of treatment by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their
task was comparatively easy; for the idyllic grace of maternal love in

the Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the courage of
confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy in redeemed souls, the
loveliness of a pure life in modest virgins, and the dramatic episodes of
sacred story, furnish a multitude of motives admirably pictorial. There
was, therefore, no great obstacle upon the threshold, so long as artists
gave their willing service to the Church. Yet, looking back upon this
phase of painting, we are able to perceive that already the adaptation of
art to Christian dogma entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the
one hand, had to be omitted from the programme offered to artistic
treatment, for the reason that the fine arts could not deal with it at all.
Much, on the other hand, had to be expressed by means which painting
in a state of perfect freedom would repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like
Prudence with two faces, and painful episodes of agony and anguish,
marred her work of beauty. There was consequently a double
compromise, involving a double sacrifice of something precious. The
faith suffered by having its mysteries brought into the light of day,
incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by being forced to
render intellectual abstractions to the eye through figured symbols.
As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art,
became more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was
worthy of being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life
observed around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty
than dogmatic mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise
with all simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display
of sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body
received separate and independent study, as a thing in itself
incomparably beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its
magic than aught else that sways the soul. At the same time the external
world, with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the
works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was
seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy
and perspective taxed the understanding of the artist, whose whole
force was no longer devoted to the task of bringing religious ideas
within the limits of the representable. Next, when the classical revival
came into play, the arts, in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the
sphere of sacred subjects, and employed their full-grown faculties in

the domain of myths and Pagan fancies. In this way painting may truly
be said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first
manifested the freedom of the modern mind. When Luca Signorelli
drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and
the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude
assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of
human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that
the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with aesthetic
beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that
liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the
earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.
Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of the
relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the
most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the
Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm
my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages--the Jews, the
iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors--were
justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the
spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but
because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4]. It is always
bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would
sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to
forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics
have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example,
lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from
worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming
colour, graceful movement, delicate emotion[5]. Nor is this all:
religious motives may be misused for what is worse than merely
sensuous suggestiveness. The masterpieces of the Bolognese and
Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion for
martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the
darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it