This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between piety and plastic art.  In truth, the difficulty of uniting them in such a way that the latter shall enforce the former, lies far deeper than its powers of illustration reach.  Religion has its proper end in contemplation and in conduct.  Art aims at presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings with a view to intellectual enjoyment.  Now, many thoughts are incapable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological understanding.  To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an impossibility.  In like manner there are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is direct hostility between religion and the arts.  The sphere of the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion.  In the large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe’s famous motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art.  They find the meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to establish in this chapter.  As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance Italy, the fine arts assumed the first place in the intellectual culture of the nation.  But the thought and feeling of the modern world required an aesthetic medium more capable of expressing emotion in its intensity, variety, and subtlety than sculpture.  Therefore painting was the art of arts for Italy.  Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range and wealth of its resources, could not deal with the motives of Christianity so successfully as sculpture with the myths of Paganism.  The religion it interpreted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, while art is bound down by its nature to the limitations of the world we live in.  The Church imagined art would help her; and within a certain sphere of subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene beauty and pure joy, by giving form to angelic beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to piety.  Yet painting had to omit the very