that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to
its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to
establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance
Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture
of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an
aesthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity,
variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of
arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of
its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so
successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it
interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is
bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The
Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of
subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of
saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving
form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and
pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion,
painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very
pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising
purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of
riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing
mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to humanity the sense of its
own dignity and beauty, and helped to proved the untenability of the
mediaeval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and,
what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness
from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty
of contemplation.