but flesh
spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form. The incarnation promised by the
arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. Heaven was brought down to
earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was
heavenly.

At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main
questions. The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted
to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century. The
second treats of the effect resulting both to art and religion from the
expression of mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form.

When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the Middle Ages by
the human mind, it is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded
a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, and had therefore never
fully learned. To over-estimate the difference from an aesthetic point of
view between the religious notions of the Greeks and those which
Christianity had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and
charity; humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the
Judgment; the Pall and the Redemption; Heaven and Hell; the height and
depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before the throne
of God: into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid and solemn,
transcending the region of sense and corporeity, carrying the mind away to
an ideal world, where the things of this earth obtained a new reality by
virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite Beyond, the modern
arts in their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or
tangible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swiftness
of a young man's limbs, no simple idealisation of natural delightfulness.
The human body, which the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of
their expression, had ceased to have a value in and for itself, had ceased
to be the true and adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the
artist. At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner
meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as a
lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than
half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce transparent walls.

In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the Greeks
recognised as truly human and therefore divine, allowed themselves to be
incarnated in well-selected types of physical perfection. The deities