in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses.  The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary.  Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend.  Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind.  Throughout this performance, art proved itself a powerful co-agent in the emancipation of the intellect; the impartiality wherewith its methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, the emphasis laid upon physical strength and beauty as good things and desirable, the subordination of classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law of loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from the differences between paganism and Christianity, and to fix it on the goodliness of that humanity wherein both find their harmony.

This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts.  In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era?  No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting.  The latter took up the work of investing thought with sensible shape from the dead hands of the former.  Nor had the tradition that connected art with religion been interrupted, although a new cycle of religious ideas had been substituted for the old ones.  The late Roman and Byzantine manners, through which the vital energies of the Athenian genius dwindled into barren formalism, still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to Christian conceptions.  But the thinking and feeling subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so all-important that it now imperatively required fresh channels for its self-expression.  It was destined to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in painting.

During the interval between the closing of the ancient and the opening of the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and material objects little better than fetishes.  The host, the relic, the wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes.  To such concrete actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible divinity.  The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful adoration.  Like Thomas, they could not be contented with believing; they must also touch and handle.  At the same time, in apparent contradistinction to this demand