As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of art, became more rightly understood, the painters found that their craft was worthy of being made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life observed around them had claims upon their genius no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries.  The subjects they had striven at first to realise with all simplicity now became little better than vehicles for the display of sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry.  The human body received separate and independent study, as a thing in itself incomparably beautiful, commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught else that sways the soul.  At the same time the external world, with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, was seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient imitation.  Anatomy and perspective taxed the understanding of the artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to the task of bringing religious ideas within the limits of the representable.  Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts, in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred subjects, and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of myths and Pagan fancies.  In this way painting may truly be said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first manifested the freedom of the modern mind.  When Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a background to his picture of Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook over the whole range of human interests.  Standing before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas with aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power antagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the spirit she sought to enthral, restoring to mankind the earthly paradise from which monasticism had expelled it.

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance.  On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages—­the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors—­were justified in their mistrust of plastic art.  The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4].  It is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith would sever us.  It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to forget.  Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics have mortified.  The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from worship