dignity and mental power;--the ideal of a Hercules, a Venus, and a
Jupiter is fully expressed, and the pagan mind satisfied. The spirit of
admirers was moved more by beauty of form than by its hidden
significance. In the great Venus, one recognises the woman before
feeling the goddess.

As with their sculpture, without doubt it was also with painting. Mr.
Symonds, in his _Renaissance of the Fine Arts_, speaks of the
Greek revival as entirely an age of sculpture; but the solitary glance
into the more perishable art of painting among the Greeks, to be seen
at Cortona, reveals the exquisite perfection to which this branch was
also brought. It is a painting in encaustic, and has been used as a
door for his oven by the contadino who dug it up--yet it remains a
marvel of genius. The subject is a female head--a muse, or perhaps only
a portrait; the delicacy and mellowness of the flesh tints equal those
of Raphael or Leonardo, and a lock of hair lying across her breast is
so exquisitely painted that it seems to move with her breath. The
features are of the large-eyed regular Greek type, womanly dignity is
in every line, but it is an essentially pagan face--the Christian soul
has never dawned in those eyes! With this before us, we cannot doubt
that Greek art found its expression as much in colour as in form and
that the same religion inspired both.

In an equal degree Renaissance Art has its roots in Christianity; but
the religion is deeper and greater, and has left art behind.

The early Christians must have felt this when they expressed everything
in symbols, for these are merely suggestive, and allow the imagination
full play around and beyond them; they are mere stepping-stones to the
ideal which exists but is as yet inexpressible.