on to madness by the wrath of the terrible divinity.
These were the last survivors of paganism, and to their protection clung
the old gods of Greece and Rome, reduced to human level by art, stripped
naked by sculptor and poet and muffling themselves in the homely or
barbaric garments of low-born or outlandish usurpers; art had been a
worse enemy than scepticism: Apelles and Scopas had done more mischief
than Epicurus.

Christian art was, perhaps, more reverent in intention, but not less
desecrating in practice; even the Giottesques turned Christ, the Virgin,
and the Saints, into mere Florentine men and women; even Angelico
himself, although a saint, was unable to show Paradise except as a
flowery meadow, under a highly gilded sky, through which moved ladies
and youths in most artistic but most earthly embroidered garments; and
Hell except as a very hot place where men and women were being boiled
and broiled and baked and fried and roasted by very comic little
weasel-snouted fiends, which on a carnival car would have made
Florentines roar with laughter. The real supernatural was in the cells
of fever-stricken, starved visionaries; it was in the contagious awe of
the crowd sinking down at the sight of the stained napkin of Bolsena; in
that soiled piece of linen was Christ, and God, and Paradise; in that
and not in the panels of Angelico and Perugino, or in the frescoes of
Signorelli and Filippino.

Why? Because the supernatural is nothing but ever-renewed impressions,
ever-shifting fancies; and that art is the definer, the embodier, the
analytic and synthetic force of form. Every artistic embodiment of
impressions or fancies implies isolation of those impressions or
fancies, selection, combination and balancing of them; that is to say,
diminution--nay, destruction of their inherent power. As, in order to
be moulded, the clay must be separated from the mound; as, in order
to be carved, the wood must be cut off from the tree; as, in order to
be re-shaped by art, the mass of atoms must be rudely severed; so also
the mental elements of art, the mood, the fancy must be severed from
the preceding and succeeding moods or fancies; artistic manipulation
requires that its intellectual, like its tangible materials, cease to
be vital, but the materials, mental or physical, are not only deprived
of vitality and power of self-alteration; they are combined in given
proportions, the action of the one on the other destroys in great
part