pure spirit.

After him, artists loved form and colour for themselves rather than for
the spiritual meaning. Miss Owen [Footnote: _Art Schools of Medieval
Christendom_, edited by Ruskin.] accuses Raphael of having rendered
Art pagan, but this seems blaming him for the weakness of his
followers, who took for their type his works rather than his ideal. The
causes of the decline were many, and are not centred in one man. As
long as Religion slumbered in monasticism and dogma, Art seizing on the
human parts, such as the maternity of the Madonna, the personifications
of saints who had lived in the world, was its adequate exponent. The
religion awakened by the aesthetic S. Francis, who loved all kinds of
beauty, was of the kind to be fed by pictures. But when Savonarola had
aroused the fervour of the nation to its highest point, when beauty was
nothing, the world nothing, in comparison to the infinity of God;--then
art, finding itself powerless to express this overwhelming infinity,
fell back on more earthly founts of inspiration, the classics and the
poets.

Lorenzo de' Medici and Pope Nicholas V. had fully as much to do with
the decline as Savonarola. The Pope in Rome, and Lorenzo in Florence,
led art to the verge of paganism; Savonarola would have kept it on the
confines of purism; it was divided and fell, passing through the
various steps of decadence, the mannerists and the eclectics, to rise
again in this nineteenth century with what is after all its true aim,
the interpretation of nature, and the illustration of the poetry of a
nation.

But with the decadence we have happily nothing to do; the artists of
whom we speak first, Fra Bartolommeo and Albertinelli, belong to the