for things of sense as signs of super-sensual power, the claims of dogma on the intellect grew more imperious, and mysticism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spiritual rapture.  For the figurative arts there was no true place in either of these regions.  Painting and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser superstitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic trances of the Middle Ages; nor had they anything in common with the logic of theology.  Votaries who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion, could have found but little to satisfy their ardour in pictures painted by a man of genius.  A formless wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life.  We all know that wunderthaetige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemaelde.  In architecture alone, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but potent feelings of infinity, their yearning towards a deity invisible, but localised in holy things and places, found artistic outlet.  Therefore architecture was essentially a medieval art.  The rise of sculpture and painting indicated the quickening to life of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a novel way of apprehending the old substance of religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts implies delight in things of beauty for their own sake, a sympathetic attitude towards the world of sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the regeneration of society through love.

The mediaeval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian painters began their work, and the sincere endeavour of these men was to set forth in beautiful and worthy form the truths of Christianity.  The eyes of the worshipper should no longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate:  his imagination should be helped by the dramatic presentation of the scenes of sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images of the passion of our Lord.  Spirit should converse with spirit, through no veil of symbol, but through the transparent medium of art, itself instinct with inbreathed life and radiant with ideal beauty.  The body and the soul, moreover, should be reconciled; and God’s likeness should be once more acknowledged in the features and the limbs of man.  Such was the promise of art; and this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of the fourteenth century.  Men ceased to worship their God in the holiness of ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on the birthday-festival of the first picture investing religious emotion with aesthetic charm.  But in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own—­the region of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was materialised to the injury of its own essential quality.  Spirit, indeed, spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form.  The incarnation promised by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness.  Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was heavenly.