The favourites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic Church, for of course we are speaking now of times long before the Reformation.  The Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life of Christ and His Apostles were well known too, and just as we never tire of reading our favourite books over and over again, our forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches representations of the stories which they could not read.  Their daily thoughts were more occupied with the Infant Christ, the saints, and the angels, than ours generally are.  They thought of themselves as under the protection of some saint, who would plead with God the Father for them if they asked him, for God Himself seemed too high or remote to be appealed to always directly.  He was approached with awe; the saints, the Virgin, and the Infant Christ, with love.

We must realise this difference before we can well understand a picture painted in the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries, nor can we look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whom he painted, so loved the holy personages.  They thought about them always, not only at stated times and on Sundays, and never tired of looking at pictures of them and their doings.  It is sometimes said that only Catholics can understand medieval art, because they feel towards the saints as the old painters did.  But it is possible for any one to realize how in those far-off days the people felt, and it is this that we must try to do.  The religious fervour of the Middle Ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people.  Some were far more cruel, savage, and unrestrained than we are to-day.  Very wicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the Church.  But it was the Church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierce age, and some of the saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catharine of Siena, are still held to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known.

The churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Florence were lined with marble, and a great picture frequently stood above the altar.  It is difficult to realize to-day that the processes which we call oil and water-colour painting were not then invented, and that no shops existed to sell canvases and paints ready for use.  The artist painted upon a wooden panel, which he had himself to make, plane flat, and cut to the size he needed.  In order to get a surface upon which he could paint, he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster which it was difficult to lay on absolutely flat.  Upon the plaster he drew the outline of the figures he was going to paint, and filled in the background with a thin layer of gold leaf, such as is to-day used for gilding frames.  After the background had been put in, it was impossible to correct the outline of the figures, and the labour of preparing the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new, lest he should spoil his work.  In the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey there is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind, and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the different pieces of wood forming the panel, beneath the layer of plaster, which has now to a great extent peeled off.