re that time primitive man had
endeavored--with who knows what desire to leave behind him some trace
of his passage upon earth--to make upon bones rude tracings of
his surroundings. The proof of the universality of art is in these
manifestations, of which the logical outcome was the complete and
splendid art of Greece. Through the sequence of Byzantine art we
come to Giotto, who, a shepherd's son under the skies of Italy, was
reinspired at the source of nature, and became the first painter as
we to-day know painting. From Giotto descends in direct line the great
family of artists who, in the service of the spiritual and temporal
sovereigns of the earth, shed illustration upon their craft and
undying lustre on their names until the old order, changing, giving
way to the new, enfranchised art in the great upheaval of the latter
part of the eighteenth century.

It is well, in order to understand the position in which this great
revolution left art, to briefly consider the conditions preceding
it. Painting, up to the end of the seventeenth century, had been
essentially the handmaiden of religion; and religion in its turn had
been so closely allied to the state that, when declining faith let
down the barriers, art took for the first time its place among the
liberal professions whose first duty is to find in the necessities
of mankind a reason for their existence. Small wonder, then, that,
accustomed to be fostered and encouraged, to be held aloof from the
material necessity of earning their daily bread, the artists of this
period sought protection from the only class which in those days
had the leisure to appreciate or the fortune to encourage them. The
people, the "general public," as we say to-day, did not exist, except
as a mass of patient workers in the first part, as a clamorous rabble
demanding its rights in the latter part, of the century. Hence the
patronage of art, its very existence, depended on the pleasure of the
nobility, and naturally enough its themes were measured according to
the tastes of its patrons. Much that was charming was produced, but
never before did art portray its epoch with such great limitations.
The persistent blindness to the signs and portents gathering thick
about them which characterized the higher classes of the time, may be
felt in its art; of the great outside world, of the hungry masses so
soon to rise in rebellion, nothing is seen. One may walk through the
palaces at Versailles, may s