arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on
corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the
requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not
unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped
in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it
could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better
world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical
appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope,
ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for
the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded
contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque
tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression.
Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive
and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had
somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy.
Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on
the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our
sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more
multiform. Colour and shadow, aerial perspective and complicated grouping,
denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their
own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less
potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To
painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal
movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by
sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it
clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply
to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art,
therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its
greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods
and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and
sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the
noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to
Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul
is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spi