evotion. I do not say that the Madonna di
S. Sisto, the Madonna del Cardellino, and such others, have not had
considerable religious influence on certain minds, but I say that on the
mass of the people of Europe they have had none whatever; while by far
the greater number of the most celebrated statues and pictures are never
regarded with any other feelings than those of admiration of human
beauty, or reverence for human skill. Effective religious art,
therefore, has always lain, and I believe must always lie, between the
two extremes--of barbarous idol-fashioning on one side, and magnificent
craftsmanship on the other. It consists partly in missal painting, and
such book-illustrations as, since the invention of printing, have taken
its place; partly in glass-painting; partly in rude sculpture on the
outsides of buildings; partly in mosaics; and partly in the frescoes and
tempera pictures which, in the fourteenth century, formed the link
between this powerful, because imperfect, religious art, and the
impotent perfection which succeeded it.

Sec. LXIII. But of all these branches the most important are the inlaying
and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented in a
central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting could
not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and
frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern
book-illustration has been so little skilful as hardly to be worth
naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes of great
importance, has always a tendency to lose itself in architectural
effect; and was probably seldom deciphered, in all its parts, by the
common people, still less the traditions annealed in the purple burning
of the painted window. Finally, tempera pictures and frescoes were often
of limited size or of feeble color. But the great mosaics of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries covered the walls and roofs of the churches
with inevitable lustre; they could not be ignored or escaped from; their
size rendered them majestic, their distance mysterious, their color
attractive. They did not pass into confused or inferior decorations;
neither were they adorned with any evidences of skill or science, such
as might withdraw the attention from their subjects. They were before
the eyes of the devotee at every interval of his worship; vast
shadowings forth of scenes to whose realization he looked forward, or of
spirits whose pres