Literature--Painting the Supreme Italian Art--Its Task in the
Renaissance--Christian and Classical Traditions--Sculpture for the
Ancients--Painting for the Romance Nations--Mediaeval Faith and
Superstition--The Promise of Painting--How far can the Figurative Arts
express Christian Ideas?--Greek and Christian Religion--Plastic Art
incapable of solving the Problem--A more Emotional Art needed--Place of
Sculpture in the Renaissance--Painting and Christian Story--Humanization
of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art--Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to
Art--Compromises effected by the Church--Fra Bartolommeo's S.
Sebastian--Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and
Philosophy--Recapitulation--Art in the end Paganises--Music--The Future of
Painting after the Renaissance.


It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks and the Italians, and
to the latter only at the time of the Renaissance, to invest every phase
and variety of intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing notable
was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries
that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of
science may be truly said to regulate our modes of thinking at the present
time, it is no less true that, during the Renaissance, art exercised a
like controlling influence. Not only was each department of the fine arts
practised with singular success; not only was the national genius to a
very large extent absorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture; but
the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely diffused than this alone
would imply. It possessed the Italians in the very centre of their
intellectual vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifestations
of their thought and feeling, so that even their shortcomings may be
ascribed in a great measure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point
of view.