The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human
mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can
never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the
painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy
vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the
religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique
paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of
free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new
art had arisen, for which it remained, within the aesthetic sphere, to
achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas
had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for
antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the
soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we
see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian
as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man
alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words,
are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same
combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly
love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure
passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They
give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the
Italians put it, _la musica è il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli
dei_. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions,
fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and
therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance,
when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope