ostly no relation to each other but juxtaposition.
We see here two directions,--one in continuation of the antique, seeking
beauty as the property of certain privileged forms, the other as the
hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate
something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning
narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the
language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face
that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are
transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto
Latini and his companions looked at him,--

"Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna,"

it is the intensity of the gaze that is present with us, not the old
tailor and his needle. But in Painting the image is usurping and
exclusive.

Of these divergent tendencies it is easy to see which must conquer. The
gifts of the spirit are more truly honored as the birthright of humanity
than as the property of this or that saint. The worship of the Madonna
is better than the worship of Athene just so far as the homage is paid
to a sentiment and not to a person. Now the Madonna, too, must come down
from her throne. The painters grew tired of painting saints and angels.
Giotto already had diverged from the traditional heads and draperies,
and begun to put his figures into the Florentine dress. Masaccio and
Filippino Lippi brought their fellow-citizens into their pictures. Soon
the Holy Family is only a Florentine matron with her baby. The sacred
histories are no longer the end, but only the excuse; everything else is
insisted on rather than the pretended theme. The second Nicene Council
had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left
to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and
tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a
great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro,
picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of
things, without regard to what they are,--this is now the religion of
Art.

These things may seem to us rather superficial, and Art to have declined
from its ancient dignity. But see how they took hold of men, and what
men they took hold of. In the midst of that bloody and shameless
fifteenth century, when only force seems sacred, men hunted these
shadows as if they were wealth and power. Paolo Uccello could not be got
a