anner there are many feelings which cannot
properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious
feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world
behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we
recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to
maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact,
there is direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the
two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect
themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large philosophy of human
nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both,
because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the
pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. They find the
meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive
that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to
its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to
establish in this chapter. As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance
Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture
of the nation. But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an
aesthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity,
variety, and subtlety than sculpture. Therefore painting was the art of
arts for Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of
its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so
successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism. The religion it
interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is
bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in. The
Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of
subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of
saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving
form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and
pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion,
painting lent efficient aid to piety. Yet painting had to omit the very
pith and kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, uncompromising
purists. Nor did it do what the Church would have desired. Instead of
riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of enforcing
mystici