denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their
own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less
potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To
painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal
movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by
sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of the form it
clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human sentiment, may supply
to enhance the passion of the spectator, pertains to painting. This art,
therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at its disposal, and its
greater adequacy to express emotion, became the paramount Italian art.

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to create gods
and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and
sepulchral monuments. In the last of these departments it found the
noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to
Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul
is settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual
character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and
its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.
The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in
peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose
tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the
proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the
right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form
be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest
sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the
art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness
of the Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the art of painting was