luence in their insidious temptation to produce
pictures or plastic art calculated to arrest immediate attention, thus
putting a premium on the spectacular, the sensational, on that which
makes the most immediate and direct appeal to the senses. The work
becomes fairly a personal document wrought with perhaps an almost
amazing finesse, but utterly failing in power to inspire joyous
sensibility to beauty or to impart to the gazer that glow of radiant
energy which lofty art invariably communicates to all who respond to its
infinite exaltation.

All great art is inspired by religious ideals. Painting and sculpture
give to these a presence. Under their creative power are these ideals
manifested. To embody them in living form becomes the absolute
responsibility of the artist. In Greece all the fortunate conditions to
produce great art were curiously combined and pre-eminently supported by
the conjunction of events and by the prevailing sentiment of the time.
The artist drew his inspiration from the most exalted conception of life
embodied in gods rather than in men. Art, too, was an affair of the
state. It was the supreme interest and held national importance. The
temple was erected to form an inclosure for the statue, rather than that
the statue was created as an adornment for the temple. The greatest
gifts were consecrated to the service of art, and under these
stimulating influences it is little wonder that artistic creation
achieved that vital potency which has thrilled all succeeding
centuries and has communicated to them something of the divine air of
that remote period. With the Renaissance in Italy art culminated in the
immortal work of Raphael and Michael Angelo. In the Sistine Chapel,
where that sublime grouping of prophets and sibyls speaks of the very
miracle of art in their impassioned fire and glow; where the figures,
the pose, the draperies are so grandly noble and infused with dignity
and presence,--the very atmosphere is vocal with the language of the
spirit and the expressions of religious reverence. These marvellous
shapes of grandeur and sublime intimations carry the soul into a
conscious communion with the divine. In these stupendous works Michael
Angelo has given to all the ages the message of the highest exaltation
of art. In the technique, in the marvellous dignity of the sentiment, in
the depth of the feeling involved, in the grace and power of the
composition, these works embody the artistic possibi