ls.

As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became
more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of
being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed
around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic
mysteries. The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all
simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of
sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. The human body received
separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably
beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else
that sways the soul. At the same time the external world, with all its
wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human
ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every
detail worthy of most patient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the
understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to
the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the
representable. Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts,
in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects,
and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan
fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era
of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind.
When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture
of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of
the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole
range of human interests. Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we
feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with
aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power
that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the
earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of
the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the
most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the
Renaissance. On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my
conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages--the Jews, the
iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors--were
justified in their mi