ped citizens, naked athletes, and half-clothed
work-folk, its sensuous religion of earthly gods and muscular demigods;
or the influence, on the other hand, of the more complex life of the
Middle Ages, essentially northern in type, sedentary and manufacturing,
huddled in unventilated towns, with its constant pre-occupation, even
among the most sordid grossness, of the splendour of the soul, the
beauty of suffering, the ignominy of the body, and the dangers of bodily
prosperity. Of all this we have heard even too much, thanks to the
picturesqueness which has recommended the _milieu_ of Monsieur Taine
to writers more mindful of literary effect than of the philosophy of
art. But there is another historical circumstance whose influence, in
differentiating Greek sculpture from the sculpture of mediaeval Italy,
can scarcely be overrated. It is that, whereas in ancient Greece
sculpture was the important, fully developed art, and painting merely
its shadow; in mediaeval Italy painting was the art which best answered
the requirements of the civilisation, the art struggling with the most
important problems; and that painting therefore reacted strongly upon
sculpture. Greek painting was the shadow of Greek sculpture in an almost
literal sense: the figures on wall and base, carefully modelled, without
texture, symmetrically arranged alongside of each other regardless of
pictorial pattern, seem indeed to be projected on to the flat surface by
the statues; they are, most certainly, the shadow of modelled figures
cast on the painter's mind.

The sculptor could learn nothing new from paintings where all that is
proper to painting is ignored:--plane always preferred to line, the
constructive details, perceptible only as projection, not as colour or
value (like the insertion of the leg and the thigh), marked by deep
lines that look like tattoo marks; and perspective almost entirely
ignored, at least till a late period. It is necessary thus to examine
Greek painting[16] in order to appreciate, by comparison with this
negative art, the very positive influence of mediaeval painting or
mediaeval sculpture. The painting on a flat surface--fresco or panel--which
became more and more the chief artistic expression of those times, taught
men to consider perspective; and, with perspective and its possibility
of figures on many planes, grouping: the pattern that must arise from
juxtaposed limbs and heads. It taught them to perceive form no longer as