ritual
character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and
its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.
The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in
peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose
tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the
proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the
right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form
be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest
sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the
art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness
of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was
not simple. The painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by
setting forth the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church
in imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of treatment
by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively easy;
for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the Madonna, the pathetic
incidents of martyrdom, the courage of confessors, the ecstasies of
celestial joy in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in modest
virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of
motives admirably pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle upon
the threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the
Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able to
perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma entailed
concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had to be omitted from
the programme offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the fine
arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the other hand, had to be
expressed by means which painting in a state of perfect freedom would
repudiate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful
episodes of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was
consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of
something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries brought
into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanised. Art suffered by
being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the eye through
figured symbo