ious feelings of the people, formulae from which to deviate
would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshiper.
Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and
stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from 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 Michael Angelo'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
Pheidias. Titian's Virgin received into Heaven, soaring midway between
the archangel who