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 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.