infancy;
and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the
natural forms he saw around him.

But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose.
Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy
of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite
devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost
beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude;
he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented
attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of
his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the
altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way
the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to
earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by
dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of
beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the
Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of
physical perfection, and to introduce _un bel corpo ignudo_ into the
composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations
of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the
host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it
expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of
progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly
human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.

Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church,
diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of
beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became
the exponent of the majesty and splendor of the human body. This final
emancipation of art from ecclesiastical trammels culminated in the great
age of Italian painting. Gazing at Michelangelo's prophets in the
Sistine Chapel, we are indeed in contact with ideas originally
religious. But the treatment of these ideas is purely, broadly human, on
a level with that of the sculpture of Phidias. Titian's "Virgin Received
into Heaven," soaring midway between the archangel who descends to crown
her and the apostles who yearn to follow her, is far less a Madonna
Assunta than the apotheosis of humanity conceived as a radiant mother.
Throughout the picture there is nothing ascetic, nothing mystic, nothing
devotional