worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols, and
brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living
human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently
substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the
principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the
display of physical perfection, and to introduce 'un bel corpo ignudo'
into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the
macerations of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the
relique and the host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which
gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
human, was revealed to their astonished eyes. Thus art, which had begun
by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its
students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing
itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty
and splendor of the human body. This final emancipation of art from
ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great age of Italian painting.
Gazing at Michael Angelo's prophets in the Sistine Chapel, we are indeed
in contact with ideas originally religious. But the treatment of these
ideas is purely, broadly human, on a level with that of the sculpture of
Pheidias. Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between
the archangel who descends to crown her and the apostles who yearn to
follow her, is far less a Madonna Assunta than the apotheosis of
humanity conceived as a radiant mother. Throughout the picture there is
nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing devotional. Nor did the art of
the Renaissance stop here. It went further, and plunged into Paganism.
Sculptors and painters combined with architects to cut the arts loose
from their connection with the Church by introducing a spirit and a
sentiment alien to Christianity.