or Assyrian, say, in the time of Homer,
whenever that may have been. For the causes which forced Greek sculpture
along the line leading to Praxiteles and Lysippus were not yet at work;
and had other forces, say, a preference for stone work instead of clay
and bronze work, a habit of Persian or Gaulish garments, of Lydian
effeminate life instead of Dorian athleticism, supervened, had satraps
ordered rock-reliefs of battles instead of burghers ordering brazen
images of boxers and runners, Praxiteles and Lysippus might have
remained _in mente Dei_, if, indeed, even there. Similarly, once
given your Pisan sculptors, Giotto, nay, your imaginary Cimabue, you
inevitably get your Donatello, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and eventually
your Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian; for the problems of form and of
sentiment, the questions of perspective, anatomy, dramatic expression,
lyric suggestion, architectural decoration, were established, in however
rudimentary a manner, as soon as painting was ordered to leave off doing
idle, emotionless Christs, rows of gala saints and symbols of metaphysic
theology, and told to set about showing the episodes of Scripture, the
things Christ and the Apostles did, and the places where they did them,
and the feelings they felt about it all; told to make visible to the
eye the gallant archangels, the lovable Madonnas, the dear little baby
Saviours, the angels with their flowers and songs, all the human hope
and pity and passion and tenderness which possessed the world in the
days of St. Francis.

What pictures should we have seen if Christianity (which was impossible)
had continued in the habits of thought and feeling of the earlier Middle
Ages? Byzantine _icones_ become frightfuler and frightfuler, their
theological piety perhaps sometimes relieved by odd wicked Manichean
symbolism; all talent and sentiment abandoning painting, perhaps to
the advantage of music, whose solemn period of recondite contrapuntal
complexity--something corresponding to the ingenuities and mysticism of
theology--might have come two centuries earlier, and delighted the world
instead of being unnoticed by it. Be this as it may, there is no need
for wondering, as people occasionally wonder, how the solemn terror, the
sweetness, pathos, or serenity of men like Signorelli, Botticelli, or
Perugino, nay Michelangelo, Raphael, or Giorgione, could have originated
among Malatestas, Borgias, Poggios, or Aretines. It did not. And,
therefore