n
much the same way as a work by a great composer.

=II. The Church and Painting.=--The Church from the first took account of
the influence of colour as well as of music upon the emotions. From the
earliest times it employed mosaic and painting to enforce its dogmas and
relate its legends, not merely because this was the only means of
reaching people who could neither read nor write, but also because it
instructed them in a way which, far from leading to critical enquiry,
was peculiarly capable of being used as an indirect stimulus to moods of
devotion and contrition. Next to the finest mosaics of the first
centuries, the early works of Giovanni Bellini, the greatest Venetian
master of the fifteenth century, best fulfil this religious intention.
Painting had in his lifetime reached a point where the difficulties of
technique no longer stood in the way of the expression of profound
emotion. No one can look at Bellini's pictures of the Dead Christ upheld
by the Virgin or angels without being put into a mood of deep
contrition, nor at his earlier Madonnas without a thrill of awe and
reverence. And Giovanni Bellini does not stand alone. His
contemporaries, Gentile Bellini, the Vivarini, Crivelli, and Cima da
Conegliano all began by painting in the same spirit, and produced almost
the same effect.

The Church, however, thus having educated people to understand painting
as a language and to look to it for the expression of their sincerest
feelings, could not hope to keep it always confined to the channel of
religious emotion. People began to feel the need of painting as
something that entered into their every-day lives almost as much as we
nowadays feel the need of the newspaper; nor was this unnatural,
considering that, until the invention of printing, painting was the only
way, apart from direct speech, of conveying ideas to the masses. At
about the time when Bellini and his contemporaries were attaining
maturity, the Renaissance had ceased to be a movement carried on by
scholars and poets alone. It had become sufficiently widespread to seek
popular as well as literary utterance, and thus, toward the end of the
fifteenth century, it naturally turned to painting, a vehicle of
expression which the Church, after a thousand years of use, had made
familiar and beloved.

To understand the Renaissance at the time when its spirit began to find
complete embodiment in painting, a brief survey of the movement of
thought in Italy