however, to trace the course of Italian art, it
will be necessary to discuss some preliminary questions, important for a
right understanding of the relations assumed by painting to the thoughts
of the Renaissance, and for explaining its superiority over the sister art
of sculpture in that age. This I feel the more bound to do because it is
my object in this volume to treat of art with special reference to the
general culture of the nation.

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task appointed for the fine
arts on the threshold of the modern world? They had, before all things, to
give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and to embody a class of
emotions unknown to the ancients.[2] The inheritance of the Middle Ages
had to be appropriated and expressed. In the course of performing this
work, the painters helped to humanise religion, and revealed the dignity
and beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth century, the riches
of classic culture were discovered, and art was called upon to aid in the
interpretation of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem was no
longer simple. Christian and pagan traditions came into close contact, and
contended for the empire of the newly liberated intellect. During this
struggle the arts, true to their own principles, eliminated from both
traditions the more strictly human elements, and expressed them in
beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same
painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of
Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by
the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their
modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic
legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed
the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the
modern mind. Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful
co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith
its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid
upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the
subordination of classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law of
loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between
paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that
humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task as