recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into
briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind.

The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh
century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by
his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald
of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message
concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol.

The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the
sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for
he is without his head;--wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his
raiment;--and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring.

239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position,
they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the
museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in
sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in
the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three
hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first
among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy
Christ's head was when He bowed it;--but how heavy His body was when
people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern
scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on,
until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of
small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether
a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and
the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of
any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St.
Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it
might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people,
became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular
mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore,
little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.

Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had
been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or
adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after
profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the
Caesars, beguiled the tedium