deration of an individual work in its relation to all
the factors that have entered into its production. The work of an
artist is profoundly influenced by the national ideals and way of life
of his race and of his age. The art of Catholic Italy is ecclesiastical;
the art of the Protestant North is domestic and individual. The actual
form an artist's work assumes is modified by the resources at his
disposal,--resources both of material and of technical methods.
Raphael may have no more to say than Giotto had, but he is able to
express himself in a fuller and more finished way, because in his
time the language of painting had become richer and more varied
and the rhetoric of it had been carried to a farther point of
development. Finally, as all art is in essence the expression of
personality, a single work is to be understood in its widest intention
and scope by reference to the total personality of the individual artist
as manifested in his work collectively, and to be interpreted by the
appreciator through his knowledge of the artist's experience of life.

In order to wrest its fullest expressiveness from a work of art it is
necessary as far as possible to regard the work from the artist's own
point of view. We must try to see with his eyes and to feel with him
what he was working for. To this end we must reconstruct
imaginatively on a basis of the facts the conditions in which he lived
and wrought. The difference between Giotto and Raphael is a
difference not of individuality only. Each gives expression to the
ideals and ways of thought of his age. Each is a creative mind, but
each bases his performance upon what has gone before, and the
form of their work is conditioned by the resources each had at his
disposal. To discover the artist's purpose more completely than he
was able to realize it for himself in the single work,--that is the aim
and function of the historical study of art. A brief review of the
achievement of Giotto and of Raphael may serve to illustrate
concretely the application of the principle and to fix its value to
appreciation.

In the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire art passed
from Rome to Byzantium. The arts of sculpture and painting were
employed in the service of the Church, imposing by its magnificence
and all-powerful in its domination over the lives and minds of men.
The function of art was to teach; its character was symbolic and
decorative. Art had no separate and indepen