of Fra Angelico,
supported on the forehead in forms of sculpturesque severity. The Angel
of Masaccio, in the Deliverance of Peter, grand both in countenance and
motion, loses much of his spirituality because the painter has put a
little too much of his own character into the hair, and left it
disordered.

Sec. 19. The influence of Greek art, how dangerous.

Sec. 20. Its scope, how limited.

Of repose, and its exalting power, I have already said enough for our
present purpose, though I have not insisted on the peculiar
manifestation of it in the Christian ideal as opposed to the pagan. But
this, as well as other questions relating to the particular development
of the Greek mind, is foreign to the immediate inquiry, which therefore
I shall here conclude in the hope of resuming it in detail after
examining the laws of beauty in the inanimate creation; always, however,
holding this for certain, that of whatever kind or degree the short
coming may be, it is not possible but that short coming should be
visible in every pagan conception, when set beside Christian; and
believing, for my own part, that there is not only deficiency, but such
difference in kind as must make all Greek conception full of danger to
the student in proportion to his admiration of it; as I think has been
fatally seen in its effect on the Italian schools, when its pernicious
element first mingled with their solemn purity, and recently in its
influence on the French historical painters: neither can I from my
present knowledge fix upon an ancient statue which expresses by the
countenance any one elevated character of soul, or any single
enthusiastic self-abandoning affection, much less any such majesty of
feeling as might mark the features for supernatural. The Greek could not
conceive a spirit; he could do nothing without limbs; his god is a
finite god, talking, pursuing, and going journeys;[77] if at any time he
was touched with a true feeling of the unseen powers around him, it was
in the field of poised battle, for there is something in the near coming
of the shadow of death, something in the devoted fulfilment of mortal
duty, that reveals the real God, though darkly; that pause on the field
of Plataea was not one of vain superstition; the two white figures that
blazed along the Delphic plain, when the earthquake and the fire led the
charge from Olympus, were more than sunbeams on the battle dust; the
sacred cloud, with its lance light and triumph