The school of Giotto was the first to feel this need of the soul. He,
taking his ideas from nature, clothed the soul in a thin veil; the
Italians call his school that of poetic art; it reached sentiment and
poetry, but did not pass them. Yet the thirteenth century was sublime
for the expression of the idea; one only has to study the intense
meaning in the works of Giotto, and Orcagna, Duccio, and the Lorenzetti
of Siena to perceive this. The fourteenth century, on the contrary,
rendered itself glorious for manifestation of form. "Artists thought
the veil of ideality a poor thing, and wished to give the solidity of
the body to the soul; they stole every secret from nature; the senses
were content, but not sentiment." [Footnote: _Purismo nell' Arte_,
da Cesare Guasti.]

The artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom we have
to speak, blended the two schools, and became perfection as far as they
went. Michelangelo drew more from the vigorous thirteenth-century
masters, and Raphael from the more sensuous followers of Masaccio and
Lippi. The former tried to put the Christian soul into his works, but
its infinite depth was unattainable. As his many unfinished works
prove, he always felt some great overwhelming meaning in his inmost
soul, which all his passionate artistic yearnings were inadequate to
express. Raphael tried to bring realism into religion through painting,
and to give us the scenes of our Lord's and the Apostles' lives in such
a humanized aspect, that we should feel ourselves of his nature. But
the incarnation of religion in art defeated its own ends; sensuousness
was introduced in place of the calm, unearthly spirituality of the
earlier masters. Compare the cartoon of S. Paul preaching at Athens, in
which he has all the majesty of a Casar in the Forum, with the lowly
spirit of the Apostle's life! In truth, Raphael failed to approach
nearer to sublimity than Fra Angelico, with all his faulty drawing but