reconcilably antagonistic to their
influence. The Reformation, on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of
compromises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to the elemental
principles of the faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts,
which, after giving sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently
attained to liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.

A single illustration might be selected from the annals of Italian
painting to prove how difficult even the holiest-minded and most earnest
painter found it to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty and
pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of Savonarola, painted a
Sebastian in the cloister of S. Marco, where it remained until the
Dominican confessors became aware, through the avowals of female
penitents, that this picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It
was then removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra
Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the martyr to be
edifying. S. Sebastian was to stand before the world as the young man,
strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and won the crown of
martyrdom. No other ideas but those of heroism, constancy, or faith were
meant to be expressed; but the painter's art demanded that their
expression should be eminently beautiful, and the beautiful body of the
young man distracted attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical
perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the
purposes of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where the
temples of Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in Christian
Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds of discord in the souls of the
devout[8].

This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and
plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that
the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of
illustration reach. Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in
conduct. Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and
feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are
incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the
philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding. To
effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the
specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an
impossibility. In like m