materialised, thus accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning
populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for artistic activity. The
whole first period of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavour to
set forth in form and colour the popular conceptions of a faith at once
unphilosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason of
the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was natural,
therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent to the arts,
which were effecting in their own sphere what she had previously
accomplished, though purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original
spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably antagonistic to their
influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of
compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental
principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts,
which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently
attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.

A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian
painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest
painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and
pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a
Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the
Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female
penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It
was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra
Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be
edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man,
strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of
martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were
meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their
expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the