good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual
feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor
can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the
fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The
truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth
century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very
considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the
secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism. Yet the
art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the
sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has
known--neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full
accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that
century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting
suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great
luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael
Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of Italian
painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the
counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and
ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel
sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.

I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles
of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters,
beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.[123] Yet this was the
birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as
Italian painting. In this public act of joy the people of Florence
recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from
the dead. If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful
that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst
of a new spirit of power and beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility
of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which,
emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist
for his work.[124]

In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of
the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai--not far,
perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that
Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, ag