amount mastery in painting. Under his influence the sculptors inclined
to picturesque effects, and the direction thus given to sculpture lasted
through the fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these masters
was distinguished by a fresh and charming naturalism and by rapid growth
in technical processes. While assimilating much of the classical spirit,
they remained on the whole Christian; and herein they were confirmed by
the subjects they were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration of
altars, pulpits, church facades, and tombs. The revived interest in
antique literature widened their sympathies and supplied their fancy with
new material; but there is no imitative formalism in their work. Its
beauty consists in a certain immature blending of motives chosen almost
indiscriminately from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalised by the
imagination of the artist, and presented with the originality of true
creative instinct. During the third stage the results of prolonged and
almost exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of the Italians as
a people, make themselves manifest. Collections of antiquities and
libraries had been formed in the fifteenth century; the literary energies
of the nation were devoted to the interpretation of Greek and Latin texts,
and the manners of society affected paganism. At the same time a worldly
Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done their utmost to enfeeble the
spirit of Christianity. That art should prove itself sensitive to this
phase of intellectual and social life was natural. Religious subjects were
now treated by the sculptors with superficial formalism and cynical
indifference, while all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing pagan
myths with new forms. How far they succeeded has been already made the
matter of inquiry. The most serious condemnation of art in this third
period is that it halted between two opinions, that it could not be
sincere. But this double-mindedness, as I have tried to show, was
necessary; and therefore to lament over it is weak. What the Renaissance
achieved for the modern world was the liberation of the reason, the power
of starting on a new career of progress. The false direction given to the
art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual revival may be
deplored; and still more deplorable is the corresponding sensual
debasement of the race who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the
life of humanity is long and vigorous, an