put in any accessory he asked himself: 'Does it mean
anything?' whereas most painters of today, in the same case, ask
themselves: 'Will it look well?' The difference between the two points
of view is the difference between jesting and being in earnest--between
an art that compared itself with an ideal future, and the art of today
that measures itself with an ideal past. The great painters of the
Renascence appealed to men and to men's selves, whereas the great
painters of today appeal chiefly to men's eyes and to that much of men
which can be stirred through the eye only.

It was not that those early artists were religious enthusiasts, moved by
a spiritual faith such as that which inspired Fra Angelico and one or
two others. Few of them were religious men; several of them, like
Perugino, were freethinkers. It was not, I think, because they looked
upon art itself as a very sacred matter, not to be jested with, since
they used their art against their enemies for revenge and ridicule. It
was rather because everyone was in earnest then, and was forced to be by
the nature of the times; whereas people now are only relatively in
earnest, and stake their money only where men once staked their lives.
That was one reason. Another may be that the greatest painters of those
times were practically men of universal genius and were always men of
vast reading and cultivation, the equals and often the superiors of the
learned in all other branches of science, literature and art. They were
not only great painters, but great men and great thinkers, and far above
doing anything solely 'for effect.' Lionardo da Vinci has been called
the greatest man of the fifteenth century--so has Michelangelo--so,
perhaps, has Raphael. They seemed able to do everything, and they have
not been surpassed in what they did as painters, sculptors, architects,
engineers, fortifiers of cities, mathematicians, thinkers. No one
nowadays ever thinks of a painter as being anything but a painter, and
people shrug their shoulders at the idea that an artist can do anything
of the kind called 'serious' in this age.

[Illustration: EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS]

One asks what were the surroundings, the customs, the habits, in which
these men grew to be already great at an age when modern boys are at
college. One asks whether that system of teaching or education, whatever
it may have been, was not much more likely to make great men than ours.
And the answer sugg