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                          CHAPTER XXIV

                   Medieval Art and the Church

            Art and Religion -- Christ and Apollo --
     The Age of Faith and Ugliness -- The Cathedral Builders
               -- The Painters of the Renaissance

                        ART AND RELIGION

     WHEN the good American sits down to arrange his grand tour of
Europe he makes an interesting discovery. He must not fail, he is
told, to visit at least a few of the cathedral towns of England,
where he will see glorious buildings which all wealth and skill of
modern America cannot create. France? Yes, there is Notre Dame at
Paris, and there are all the treasures of the Louvre, and then
there are the cathedrals at Amiens, Chartres, Rouen, etc. In Spain
he must not miss the cathedrals of Seville and Burgos, the Murillos
in the Prado and at Seville, etc. In Italy, of course, it will take
weeks to see the unique wonders of Rome, Florence, Venice, Pisa,
Milan. And, if he is rich, he may try to smuggle into America a
small painting, an ivory crucifix, a piece of old lace -- one of a
thousand things that the colossal wealth of America cannot produce.

     Evidently, he reflects, there was a time when this sleepy old
dame Europe could do things. When was it? And some pupil of the
Jesuits or the Paulists will tell him, with the smile of the
virtuous person whose snowy innocence has been vindicated at last:
"In the Middle Ages, my friend. In just those centuries which those
damnable books of yours describe as a dyspeptic mess of stupidity,
coarseness, burning flesh, and strong ale. And it was the religion
of the Middle Ages, the religion represented to you as the height
of European civilization, which inspired these immortal,
inimitable, world-venerated embodiments of beauty. We produce these
things no longer because that religion no longer fires the heart
and exalts the imagination of the race."

     From the first I promised that we would examine the virtues as
well as the vices of the Middle Ages. I am too old an artist to
paint a picture in monotone; nor should I expect to meet the wishes
of my readers if I presented the balance sheet of the Christian
religion with every petty item meticulously recorded on the
unfavorable side and most valuable credits omitted from the other
side.

     Thousands now pass annually from the Churches to the vast army
of the churchless: hardly any pass in the opposite direction. And
the chief reason is that when a believer opens a Rationalist work
he learns something that had been concealed from him, whereas, when
a Rationalist opens a Christian work, he learns nothing. It is the
modern apologetic, with its distortions, suppressions and
antiquities, which is ruining the Churches.

     But let us come back to medieval art. For ages to come, until
the hand of man can no longer maintain their venerable frames, the
great cathedrals will chasten the pride or vanity of a more
scientific race. For all time the beautiful paintings of the Middle
Ages will be the masters of the living masters of the art. New
schools of painting and architecture and sculpture may rise and
fall, but those princely achievements of form and color will never

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lose their power to enthrall and uplift. Do not, pray, imagine that
this chapter is going to attempt the quixotic task of suggesting
that the art of the Middle Ages has been, like the virtue or the
wisdom or the happiness of the time, exaggerated.

     What we are going to consider is whether the Christian
religion inspired this art; and let me give you at once a number of
reasons for approaching that issue with an open mind.

     A few years ago I sat in the solemn gloom of Seville cathedral
and bowed before its stupendous majesty and grace. Then, as is my
custom, I reflected. Another temple, a Mohammedan mosque, had
previously existed on the site, and it was torn down that this
church of Christ might rise disdainfully upon its ruins. But all
agree that the mosque was, in its own fashion, as superb as the
Christian cathedral. The surviving mosque at Cordova, the palace at
Seville, the Alhambra at Granada, compel us to believe that.

     Now what was the common inspiration in the Mohammedan Moor and
the Christian Spaniard? Not any element of Christianity. Moreover,
the Moors created immortally beautiful things within four centuries
of the founding of their religion; but the Christian cathedrals
which we cross sea and land to visit did not appear until more than
a thousand years after the founding of Christianity, and the
Christian pictures not until several centuries later.

     Reflect again, on the strange succession in the efflorescence
of the arts. First comes the triumph of architecture and sculpture.
Painting, which can as admirably express religious emotion, still
waited a century or two. Poetry which would seem from the start to
have been the fittest art to be inspired by religion, waited still
longer. Except Chaucer and Dante, whom not one in ten thousand read
today, can you name off-hand one Christian poet before the age of
Humanism? Music, as amenable to religious inspiration as any art,
was the last of all to reach the stature of genius; and half the
great masters of even religious music were not Christians. Strange
how unevenly this inspiration of religion was felt by five arts,
each of which was as capable as the other of giving a sublime
expression to religious emotion.

     Further, and this brings us near to the heart of the matter,
when we speak of the art of the Middle Ages, let us conceive
exactly in our own minds what we mean. By the Middle Ages we
understand, roughly, the time from about 500 to 1500 (or 1600) A.D.
In many respects, the Middle Ages lasted until the nineteenth
century, but we may draw a line with a bold stroke at about the
year 1500, when science was reborn, printing was invented, the
earth was discovered, and the Reformation began. That leaves a
thousand years for the Middle Ages.

     Well, unless you have a technical interest, there is not a
building, a picture, or a statue in Europe that you will cross the
street to see that belongs to the first half of that millennium.
The beautiful buildings belong mainly to the thirteenth and later
centuries, the beautiful pictures mainly to the fifteenth and
sixteenth. In other words, the great artistic inspiration of Europe
began at the same time as the mighty rebellion against the


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prevailing religion. The earlier half, or more than half, of the
Middle Ages, when religion was most profoundly and generally
believed, was artistically barren. It is just when the modern
spirit begins to invade the Middle Ages that great art appears.
During the three centuries of magnificent artistic creativeness the
church had to slay hundreds of thousands of rebels and to lay its
iron-tipped lash on the backs of millions. There is ground for
inquiry.

     Finally, there is greater art in Europe than the medieval art.
No one disputes the supremacy of Greek architecture, sculpture, and
literature. In the museum at Athens there are gold cups which, a
leading expert says, are as fine as anything produced in the Middle
Ages; and they belong to the old Cretan civilization. Egyptian art
needs no praise, and such fragments of imperial Rome as remain will
match in beauty most of the artistic creations of later Christian
Rome -- are, in fact, far superior to anything produced in the Rome
of the Popes for more than a thousand years after Rome became
Papal. And beyond Europe is the art of India, of China, of Japan.

     So the argument assumes a broader form, and we are told that
it is religion, not this or that religion in particular, which
inspires art. Is it not the temples of Athens and Egypt you admire?
Are not the marble statues which the world treasures effigies of
gods and goddesses? Here is the very latest American writer on the
subject, Von Ogden Vogt ("Art and Religion," 1926), assuring us
that "religion has been historically the great fountain source of
art." He quotes another recent writer saying: "Art will never arise
and develop among men unless it has a foundation in religion."
This, says Mr. Von Ogden Vogt, is an exaggeration, but "something
like it is true."

     And I would, with becoming modesty, point out to these
dogmatic gentlemen, who issue their works from American
universities, that this is a historical statement, and that
scarcely a single historian of art ever makes it. They ought to
know. Here is one of the latest and most original, Elie Faure's
"History of Art," a sumptuous four-volume translation of which
appeared in America in 1921. Faure surveys artistic creations from
the beginning of civilization, and somehow he quite fails to see
that religion is the great inspirer of art -- least of all, we
shall see, of medieval art. Religion has been a great employer of
art, but otherwise Faure traces the evolution of art as if religion
did not exist.

     Here is another comprehensive study in two fine volumes, Mr.
Luebke's "Outlines of the History of Art" (the American edition
rewritten by Russell Sturgiss in 1922). Luebke is more generous to
religion than Faure, but you fail to learn from him that religion
is the great inspirer. You do not read it either (if you read
German) in Springer's "Kunstgeschichte" (eleventh edition 1921) or
Rosenberg's "Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte" (third edition 1921) or
even the Catholic Franz von Reber's older but excellent "History of
Medieval Art" (New York edition 1887), of which I am going to make
considerable use. It is in religious writers, not in historians of
art, that you read the dogmatic statement that religion inspires
art, and that the Christian religion inspired medieval art.


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     I have just pointed out one root of the fallacy. Organized and
wealthy religions employ the artist, so his creations have very
largely a religious character. Beethoven and Mozart are sung in the
Catholic churches of America today; and both artists were apostates
from the Catholic faith when they wrote the music. Pinturicchio, a
very wicked little skeptic, painted the pretty mistress of Pope
Alexander VI (for the Pope, in the Vatican) as a very modest and
demure Virgin Mary. Fra Filippo Lippi, as amorous a monk as ever
lived (which is saying a good deal), painted most beautiful and
most correct religious pictures, In Faure's "History of Art" I
notice half a dozen photographs of statues of the goddess
Aphrodite, as finely executed as any statues of Mary in the world;
and they are all portrait statues of prostitutes, with whom the
sculptors were probably familiar.

     I would rather here point out a second root of the fallacy, as
I know no writer on art who has drawn attention to it; except that
Faure attributes the decline of Athenian art in great measure to
"the reign of intellectualism." It is a pregnant thought. Great art
so commonly accompanies religion because it occurs in an early
phase of the evolution of civilization, when religion still
dominates the majority. Art decays when religion decays because
intellectualism has taken the life of both, not because it has
weakened art by destroying religion.

     Once, being invited to open a debate in some artistic corner
in New York, I maliciously gave the thesis: "America never had an
art and never will." Artists came in large numbers to see me slain,
but, if I remember rightly, I won the vote.

     The civilization of the United States was formed from
fragments of three nations -- to speak only of the original French,
Dutch, and English -- which had had their great artistic
efflorescence centuries before.

     Athens artistically decayed when its philosophical period
opened. Egypt had a high art six thousand years ago, and it had
other artistic periods of distinction only after prolonged
confusion and rejuvenation. It is a general historical truth that
a nation's time of high artistic creativeness comes at a relatively
early stage of its development, though the love of beauty and
technical excellence may be conservatively maintained, as in China,
Japan, and India. The law holds good of Assyrians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs -- quite generally, in fact.

     I ascribed it, long before Faure's book was written, to a
"reign of intellectualism." Take the English Bible as a sample of
the English mind at the time; for it was not written by literary
geniuses. No group of men in the English-speaking world could write
like that today. It is psychologically impossible. We are too
intellectualized. We have lost the art of instinctive concrete
thinking. The imagination has been enfeebled as the intellect
developed. The language has changed, and is a thousand times more
abstract, because we all -- not merely philosophers and scientists
-- do far more abstract thinking. Words which to Shakespeare's
hearers must have seemed "words of learned length and thundering
sound" are on our lips every day. His simple, spontaneous, concrete
imagery even our poets cannot experience.

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     In this light the art of the Middle Ages begins to be
intelligible. There was plenty of religion, but no great art,
during more than half of the Middle Ages. For the remainder there
was very much less sincere religion, yet very great art. There is
no connection with religion except that religious organizations or
communities had most of the money to employ art and had
sufficiently lost their original puritanism to appreciate it. But
the real cause was that the tribes which had destroyed the Roman
Empire had slowly settled and grown into the Italian, French,
German, and English nations, and they were due to experience their
artistic springtime. They learned what civilization was, and they
infused all their young vigor and richness of imagination into its
customary first manifestation, art: as the first Greeks to reach
the Mediterranean, the Arabs when they reached the Persians, the
Toltecs and Aztecs when they reached the Mayas, had done.

     Thus there is a general law of these "golden ages" of the
nations. I am not writing a manual of the history of art, so I must
be content with short indications which the reader who is specially
interested may verify. It is a very general rule that a nation has
one golden age of artistic creativeness, and it comes at the
beginning of the full development of civilization. You will find
that in the case of Egypt (which, however, had, like Persia,
reconstructions and rebirths), Assyria, Persia, Athens, Rome, the
Byzantine Empire, the Moors, and the new European nations. I do not
admit any law of decline and death of civilizations, yet there is
something like a spring and early summer, with a riot of color and
energy, once the winter of barbarism is over. This occurs at a time
when the religion is still generally believed and enforced (though
not necessarily, as we shall see, believed by the artists
themselves), and, as man gives most of his resources to the gods,
the art serves religion. It is a coincidence. The next and higher
phase of civilization destroys religion and enfeebles the artistic
inspiration. Where there is not a progressive intellectual
development (Egypt, Babylon, Persia, China, India), the artistic
level remains comparatively high, and the mass of the people remain
religious.

     We have to see whether the great art produced in Europe from
the thirteenth to the sixteenth century is not explained on these
lines. Dr. Franz von Reber, a Catholic art-director, writing in the
heart of Catholic Bavaria, prefixes to his "History of Medieval
Art," a twelve-page summary of his survey. There is not a single
reference to religion in it, except that here and there he notices
that pure Christianity is antagonistic to art. He does not grasp
the law that I have formulated, but the whole story which he tells
is consistent with it. In a sheltered area of Europe in the
eleventh century architecture first reaches distinction. By the
thirteenth century most parts of Europe are settled and prospering,
and then the great age of architecture and sculpture occurs, and
the age of the great painters opens. The only reference to religion
which he and other writers make here is that one aspect of this
creative period is that the laity of Europe have at last wrested
art from the monks and made it human, even when it is religious.





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                        CHRIST AND APOLLO

     It is the boast of the Roman Catholic, and a commonplace
observation of the artist, that the Protestant chapel is cold and
uninspiring, the Catholic church warm, artistic, pleasant and
stimulating to the emotions. The Reformers themselves would have
met such a boast with a snort of contempt. This was precisely what
they aimed to create. The Catholic church represented a thoroughly
pagan version of Christianity. Their own stern and bare meeting
places expressed a return to Christ. They were worshipers of God,
not of Apollo. If a man or woman could not throb and thrill with
devotion in a direct communication with God, be or she was not yet
a Christian.

     So the early Church had believed for centuries, and it is the
only correct interpretation of the message of Jesus. Ritual is
fossilized religion. Vestments and incense and candles are evidence
of low religious vitality. Jesus scorned the beautiful temple, the
picturesque garb of the priests, the set festivals, the music, the
book of words. A man must address himself directly to God, in short
prayers. One of the most delicious absurdities of Catholic worship
is that the Lord's prayer is introduced (and in Latin!) in the
middle of a service that lasts an hour and a half. We can, of
course, easily see that Christ did not compose the prayer, which is
a compilation of earlier prayer-phrases, but it was written for the
express purpose of showing that long services were unnecessary and
undesirable.

     There was a second reason why pure and primitive Christianity
scorned art. Jesus quite certainly said -- if we accept any part of
the gospels as authentic -- that the end of the world was near. The
gospels, as we have them, were written so late that we cannot
accept on their authority any particular word or deed attributed to
Jesus, yet this idea of the speedy approach of the end of the world
is so characteristic, and it so strongly tinges the whole ethic
ascribed to Jesus, that it seems reasonable to believe that there
was an historical Jesus, an Essenian, warning men to meet the
coming judgment in purity and poverty. Could anything be more
widely removed from the Dionysiac urge, the Apollo spirit, of the
Greeks? What had such communities to do with art?

     And when these followers of Jesus found themselves, as they
soon did, living amongst the pagan crowds of the Greek and Roman
cities, there was a third reason why they distrusted and disliked
art. The religious use of it was essentially pagan. The Greek and
Roman religions were, at that late date, not matters of sentiment.
You were not transfigured with awe and devotion when you turned
your thoughts to our Father Zeus or Father Diu (Jupiter). You
thought of their love-affairs and family jars and you smiled. They
were gods and so you gave them your grain of incense, and attended
the festivals when priests -- not a consecrated caste, but lay
officials like yourself -- in becoming costumes paid the communal
respect to them. Without art all this would have been insipid, so
the temple was a museum of art. Every sense was gratified. Even the
nostrils were tickled. The room was full of beautiful statues,
pictures, altars and odors. In the article on the Middle Ages in
the "Encyclopedia Britannica" my friend Professor Shotwell, of
Columbia University, says.

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          In the realm of art the "Middle Ages" had already set in
     before Constantine robbed the arch of Titus to decorate his
     own, and before those museums of antiquity, the temples, were
     plundered by Christian mobs. The victory of Christianity --
     iconoclastic in its primitive spirit -- Was but a single
     chapter in the story of decline.

This was the fourth century, and Professor Shotwell's direct aim is
to extenuate the artistic sterility of Christianity in the early
Middle Ages by reminding us that the Church, when it did at last
relax its puritanism, inherited a decadent art. Dr. von Reber says
much the same (p. 73): "The general debasement of art and the
conceptions of Christianity worked together to destroy that
perfection of outward appearance which is the vital principle of
all art." We quite admit that the golden age of Roman art was over,
the golden age of Greek art long past, when Christianity spread.
But what concerns us for the moment is that the pagan religions
employed all the art that there was to evoke a sensuous response in
worshipers, and it was of the very essence of Christianity to
resist this. From its Hebrew parent, the Jewish religion, it had
inherited a great distrust of statues and pictures. Christ went
further and condemned temples, ritual, sacrifices, vestments,
festivals and so on. Christianity stood for a stark spiritual
nudity. The slightest titillation of sense was a contamination. Not
even the slenderest sketch of Christ or any of his chief early
followers was bequeathed to the Church. Art served the devil.

     It is related in history that the Emperor Severus, who died in
235 A.D., had a bust of Christ in his private chapel. Whether this
means that the emperor had an imaginary portrait executed by one of
his pagan sculptors or that the Christians were in some places
beginning to patronize art, we do not know. But most probably it
was a pagan sculpture, for the Fathers are almost uniformly severe
against art. The most liberal scholar of the early Church, Origen,
wanted to have painters and sculptors excluded from the Christian
body. There had to be meeting places, since Christ's predicted end
of the world had not happened. There had to be, the gospels said,
commemorations of the last supper; and this easily became a ritual
with ceremoniously garbed priests.

     Moreover, the bodies of the martyrs could not very well be
just thrust into their niches in the catacombs with a mere mention
of the name. Members of the Christian community who could paint or
carve were invited or permitted -- we do not know when -- to
decorate the graves and walls. Art could not be entirely excluded
from any human enterprise, but the religion itself was anti-
artistic, anti-sensual, as long as it was pure. And there was as
yet no veneration of Mary, and the legends of fair girl-martyrs --
in fact most of the more picturesque legends of the martyrs were
not forged until centuries later.

     It is therefore immaterial that during the first three
centuries the Christian body had very little opportunity to
encourage or inspire art. It was against its principles to
patronize art. St. Jerome, one of the few literary artists -- I
mean one of the few writers with a really good Latin style --
shuddered with fear of hell because he dreamed one night that


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Christ had sternly accused him of being a Ciceronian. No expert
writer on art who notices the subject fails to point out that the
pure teaching of Christ, the sternest asceticism, was hostile to
art. The senses were to be starved. They were the devil's avenues
to the soul. And the whole story of later Christian art is a story
of departures from Christ and approaches to Apollo on the part of
the degenerating Christian body.

     The first concession was when the persecutions ceased and the
emperor was converted to Christianity. The new religion now had
liberty of worship, large crowds of worshipers to house, and great
wealth with which to build. It at once ignored as quite
impracticable the injunction of Jesus that his followers should
worship God in spirit only, without temples. All Christians have
ignored it ever since. The real reason is that no religion would
survive so severe a test as that. The flock needs shepherds, and
the shepherds need dogs. The idea of the consecrated caste of
priests and of the "mass" had already been developed in the Church.
There was now a priesthood with an instinct of self-preservation.

     So the Church decided at once to have large places of worship
-- basilicas, they called them -- built with the gold of
Constantine and his successors. Architects dispute whether these
primitive churches were built on the model of the Roman public
basilica (or public hall) or of the private hall in a large Roman
house in which the Christians had hitherto been accustomed to meet,
or some other type. That does not concern us. The main idea was to
avoid the model of the Greek or Roman temple.

     But from the first, concessions were made to human nature and
to the ambitions of the priests themselves. The basilicas were
handsome structures, often richly decorated. Luebke, who is more
disposed to say a word now and again in favor of religion, speaks
of these fourth-century basilicas as "superb" and "impressive."
Reber, who is more detached and conscientious, speaks of "meager
and monotonous architecture" with "magnificent colored decoration."

     It is enough that the Church began at once to employ art. It
gave art no inspiration. Rome was at the time a glorious city, with
miles of beautiful marble temples, public buildings, triumphal
arches and colonnades, and this early Christian art certainly did
not rise above its models. But the cult of Apollo had begun. The
Church was not yet in a position to compel the pagans to join it.
They had to be attracted. And, since the story of Jesus did not
seem very effective in that respect, and the Romans shrank from its
bleak asceticism, the artist had to be introduced.

     Toward the end of the century the Church got the political
power to crush all its rivals and enforce its creed by imperial
decree on the whole Roman world. Here was a crucial moment in the
relation of the Church to art. Since there was no longer (in
theory) a need to attract, the Church could afford to be Christian
and abandon the allurements of art. In point of fact, the Church
had already at the end of the fourth century, got so far away from
Christ that real Christians, like Helvidius and Jovinianus (early




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Protestants), were condemned and persecuted. Art was now
permanently enlisted. Human nature will not long tolerate any
religion unless there is a little human nature in the religion. Man
makes gods in his own image and likeness.

     Historians at this point generally bemoan the vandalism of the
Church in destroying the pagan temples with all their artistic
treasures, and there is now a tendency to restrict the Church's
responsibility for this. The Catholic archeologist, De Rossi, held
that fewer temples were destroyed, and more adapted to Christian
worship, than had been supposed. Reber says:

          In reference to such adaptations, it has become the
     fashion to maintain that the Christian emperors were wisely
     desirous of preventing the destruction of the temples of the
     ancients; but this preservation was, in reality, rather owing
     to an interference with selfish abuse of the buildings and
     their materials by individuals than to any real respect for
     them as monuments of art.

In the year 399 the Emperor Honorius ordered that all rural temples
should be destroyed and that those in the cities should be
preserved as "civic ornaments." Twenty-seven years later the
Emperor Theodosius decreed: "All pagan temples still remaining in
perfect preservation are to be destroyed or consecrated by the sign
of the cross." In point of fact, few were preserved. Of the more
famous pagan temples only the Parthenon at Athens survived. The
most resolute vandalism dare not lay its hands on that. It was
converted into a church. But the Scrapeum of Alexandria, all the
beautiful Greek temples of Diana and Aphrodite, all the greater
temples of Rome, were either destroyed or left to decay. Priests
and monks, especially in the east, led mobs to the wreck of the
fairest buildings; and of the immense mass of art-treasures they
had contained only a few fragments have come down to us.

     A writer on art naturally deplores this vandalism, as he must
call it, but I do not stress it from our present point of view. The
Christian leaders had taught that the gods and goddesses of the
pagan world were devils, and so this iconoclasm was quite
inevitable. The chief point is that Christianity, in destroying the
old art, could not create a new, because it refused and disdained
the service of art as long as it was faithful to the principles of
Jesus. "In short," says Reber, after reviewing the first few
centuries, "primitive Christianity gave no impulse to the arts." I
do not see how any person could expect it. In the fourth century,
when it became less Christian and more wealthy, when emperors and
courtiers and scholars began to attend church, the architect,
painter, and sculptor were employed for Christian work. But, says
Reber, examining what remains of their achievements, "all such
protection and encouragement were of little more avail than is
medical aid to a hopelessly decrepit body."

     Christian art was young, you may say. One must allow it time
to develop. But all the authorities are agreed that it degenerated,
rather than advanced, during the fourth and fifth centuries. The
Roman world was in decay, and there was no part of its life which
the new religion was fitted to inspire and invigorate. The greatest


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Christian work of the time was St. Augustine's "City of God." The
key-note of it is that Christianity does not care two cents what
happens in "the city of men," or mere secular civilizations and
culture: its sole concern is to make and keep men citizens of the
"city of God," to teach them to subdue their sensuous feelings and
preserve their virtue. That was true Christianity. It is quite
absurd to affect to find artistic inspiration in it.

                  THE AGE OF FAITH AND UGLINESS

     Then, in the fifth century, there occurred the mighty
catastrophe, the fall of the Roman Empire, which distorted the
whole course of human development. The older Christian apologists
almost completely forgot this dislocation of civilization. They
asked us to believe that the world became more virtuous, refined,
and cultivated after the triumph of Christianity. Now that the
historical facts are widely known, the new apologists use the
catastrophe to lighten the responsibility of their religion. How,
they ask us, could you expect the new religion in such
circumstances to make the world more virtuous, more refined or more
cultivated?

     I take this triumph of barbarism fully into account and try to
ascertain what Christianity might reasonably be expected to do and
did not do. We will now make every allowance for it in connection
with Christian art. Even the mediocre Christian art of the fourth
century degenerated. For five further centuries Europe remained,
with the exception of one area, a drab, sordid, ugly mass of semi-
barbarism.

     The one exception was the district of Ravenna in north Italy,
and it is interesting. When Rome fell, Ravenna was chosen as a
residence by the emperor, and later it came into the possession of
the Greek emperors. Its position on the coast of the Adriatic -- it
was the predecessor of Venice as a seaport -- made it very suitable
for communication with Constantinople. And the art of Ravenna,
which is the only art to be taken into account before the tenth
century, is Greek or Byzantine art. In fact, the early art of
Venice itself, the magnificent church of St. Mark, is Byzantine.

     The impartial historian of art will therefore turn to the
eastern half of Christendom in order to follow the undisturbed
relations of art and Christianity. The rulers of the eastern empire
were all Christians from Constantine, its founder, onward. Rival
religions were early and thoroughly extinguished. Streams of gold
flowed into the veins of the Church, and the Greek Empire was
practically untouched by the barbaric invasions. Here we should
find an almost pure illustration of the artistic inspiration of the
Christian religion.

     But the Catholic historian of art, F. von Reber, at once warns
us not to expect much:

          From the union of Roman enervation with Oriental languor
     nothing could be born but the long decrepitude of Byzantine
     Christianity -- the trunk was too rotten and the graft too
     degenerate to bring forth a fair fruit. The evil qualities of


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     Oriental society are evident throughout: luxury, despotism, a
     superstitious religion, and a slavish obedience to temporal
     powers.

Reber frankly acknowledges that early Christianity was anti-
artistic, and he therefore does not for a moment expect the Church
to vivify and invigorate this enervated world. The feat would by no
means have been impossible if Christianity had been really a
civilizing force, which Augustine never claimed it to be. Ancient
Egypt twice fell into a similar state of decrepitude, and was twice
rejuvenated and suffused with energy and artistic creativeness.
Ancient Persia was restored, and had a splendid art and culture, at
the very time of this failure of the Greek Empire which Reber
describes. There was, it is true, a short period of Byzantine
energy under the Emperor Justinian, when the church of St. Sophia
(now a mosque) at Constantinople was built, but it soon passed, and
the prosperous and almost untroubled empire remained artistically
feeble, or actually degenerated.

     Byzantine art at its best, as seen in its finest products, St.
Sophia and St. Mark, is an illustration of the way in which the
leaders of the Church were constantly persuaded to betray the
principles of Christ and enlist the service of art. As Faure
sincerely says (ii, 262)

          Had Christianity remained as St. Paul desired it, and as
     the Fathers of the Church defined it, it must needs have
     turned its back upon the plastic interpretations of the ideas
     which it introduced. But as it wished to live, it obeyed the
     law which compels us to give to our emotions the form of the
     things that we see.

The Christian ideas, in other words, would of themselves fail to
hold the mass of the people in any age. The Church replies that it
may and must, therefore, consult the spiritual feebleness of human
nature by expressing these ideas in architecture, sculpture,
painting, embroidery and music. Very well; but it is an historical
truth that neither Christ nor St. Paul nor any weighty Father of
the early Church admitted this, and it is a psychological truth
that it is the pleasure of the art, not its idea-content, which
attracts. So clear was this even in the Greek Empire that there
soon arose the sect of the Iconoclasts (image-breakers) who, in
sincere fidelity to the principles of Christ, checked the new
service of art for several centuries.

     Thus the first notable Christian art, the Byzantine, arose
from worldly considerations, and it had so little vital inspiration
from religion that it soon degenerated into a mechanical, if
technically excellent, imitation of early models, a lifeless and
conventional and often grotesque presentment of divine-human
subjects which was neither divine nor human. It is the real source
of those elongated, stiff, unanatomical, bloodless saints and
Christs, often beautifully painted or carved, which you see in the
illuminated missals, the altar panels, the crucifixes of the early
Middle Ages. Reber's verdict is (P. 99):




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          The last traces of antique art were lost in soulless
     imitation of imitations: artistic work became from age to age
     more mechanical and more unreal, losing all appreciation and
     even pretense of beauty, which quality, in as far as the human
     body was concerned, was held by the ascetic tenets of the
     Christian Church not only in disesteem, but in positive
     condemnation.

Let us note in particular the service of the monks. It is nauseous
to read in one history after another the conventional reference to
the "magnificent service" of the monks to art and culture. A
religion that makes a desert of a civilized world and then boasts
of creating a few oases in it is not entitled to such flattery; and
the overwhelming majority of the monks -- of whom there were
millions from the fifth to the twelfth century -- did nothing for
either art or culture or virtue. A few monasteries spent part of
their time in sacred art, and, where the monks were really austere
and sincere, the forms they painted or carved or wrought in mosaic,
often with exquisite technique, were as far removed from reality
and truth as were their religious ideas. It was the wicked monks
and bishops who encouraged and treasured real art, when their taste
rose above the coarsest sensual level.

     Glance, on the other hand, at Persia. The ancient kingdom
which had inherited all the art and culture of Babylon and Assyria,
had soon declined and suffered several centuries of the kind of
demoralization which occurred in Europe. But the Sassanid kings had
raised it to as great a height of vigor and elegance as it had
previously attained, and, while the Greek Empire was degenerating
under the Christian religion, the Persian civilization was rising.

     In the year 636 A.D. it fell to the Arabs. Here we have an
even closer and more instructive parallel. The Arabs were at the
time as barbaric as the Goths and Vandals who overthrew the Roman
Empire, and their Mohammedan religion so sternly forbade the
representation of animal or human forms that their rude
inappreciation of art was converted, in large part, into a positive
hatred. Yet within a hundred years Persia was raised again, for the
second time, to its old level, and the new Arabian-Persian culture
became the most famous in the world. It is, at least in a general
way, known to everybody by the high civilization of the Saracens,
who taught the European Christian knights more than one lesson in
refinement, and by its Spanish outgrowth, the culture of the Moors,
which was to play an important part in the re-civilizing of Europe.

     Many writers on history and art seem to lose the historic
sense whenever they have occasion to mention the successes or the
failures of Christianity. It is convenient for them to forget the
historical parallels which are usually employed to elucidate any
phase of human development. The parallels I have just noticed show
that neither the decadence of Greco-Roman art nor the languor of
the "enervated" east (which was for millennia the most vigorous and
progressive part of the earth) nor the rudeness of the northern
barbarians suffices to explain the failure of Byzantine art or the
infinitely worse failure of Christian art in Europe. It is not
enough to remind us, as every historian of art does, of the
continued demoralization and the incessant invasions from the north


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of Europe. Arab-Persian art represents just such a combination of
enfeebled civilization, barbaric strength, and anti-artistic
religion. But a great art was developed, and it was developed, not
under the inspiration of the Mohammedan or any other religion, but
precisely in defiance of the strict precepts of the religion. When
art does at last develop in Europe, we shall find that it similarly
derives from quite other sources than religion.

     The Moorish art of Spain may in the meantime yield us another
lesson of importance. The man who visits the wonderful mosque at
Cordova, built mainly during the very darkest of the Dark Ages of
-- Europe the ninth and tenth centuries -- may be tempted to
reflect how here again religion has inspired art. But let him read
the story of Cordova in those days, and he will realize that this
surviving structure was only one of a vast number of beautiful and
generally secular buildings. Let him visit the Alcazar at Seville
(built by Moorish artists) and the Alhambra at Granada, and, if he
be logical, he will now say that royalism was just as inspiring as
religion. Neither was inspiring. Both employed the artist. His art
was a native human impulse which he expended in the beautification
of every instrument and aspect of Moorish life. The mosque and the
city-gate, the copy of the Koran and the copy of some lascivious
Arab poem, were equally beautiful.

                     THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS

     Our art-authorities are generally agreed on what I have said
up to the present. One had a little more appreciation of fourth-
century art than another: one is less disdainful than another of
Byzantine art. But they agree that Europe was so generally squalid
from the fifth to the tenth century that a description of the
period as an age of faith and ugliness is a broadly correct
description. I qualify the statement only lest it may be thought
that I have forgotten the patiently and often delicately worked
miniatures and carvings, on debased models, which came from many of
the monasteries. These are not great art but patient and skilful
craftsmanship.

     The first half of my thesis, therefore, can hardly be
disputed; and there is the same general agreement about the second
half. Here, however, we need to find our way more cautiously. The
name and personalities of the artists begin to be known to us, and
since they are often religious men (Raphael, Michelangelo, etc.),
it may seem a nice task to attempt to dissociate their artistic
inspiration from their religious convictions and sentiments. We
shall find guiding principles in this matter, but it is well to
take first a general view. And the general view of the art of the
later Middle Ages which we find in all the historians is that,
taken as a whole, it was due, not to religion, but to secular or
economic conditions.

     I have spoken of the Romanesque architecture which opens this
period of great art. Luebke, the least anti-clerical of the
authorities, remarks (i, 515) that "it attained a higher
development just in proportion as it withdrew from the narrowing
influence of monasteries." He adds:



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          This new spirit, this free movement, is distinctly
     evident in the various branches of culture. Its dimly
     discerned but eagerly sought goal was the freeing of the
     individual from the rule of the priesthood, though only in the
     limited degree consistent with the religious ideas of the
     Middle Ages.

The qualifying words at the close of this paragraph are
incongruous, because in the Middle Ages all revolt against "the
rule of the priesthood," in any department of life, was heresy.
Reber agrees when he gives us the characteristic of the age as "the
removal of higher culture from the cell of the monk to the forum of
everyday life." More fully be describes what happened in these
words (p. 481)

          New political and social relations so entirely altered
     the character of occidental civilization that its products
     were essentially different. The results of the Crusades
     certainly did not correspond to the sacrifices which they had
     required, but they, nevertheless, like a thunderstorm, cleared
     the heavy and sultry air which had hung over Europe during the
     later Romanic period. Art was taken by the laity from the
     hands of the clergy and the monkish communities, and was freed
     from dogmatic traditions. In poetry, sculpture, and painting,
     the study of nature was cultivated, and in architecture a
     greater independence and originality soon made itself felt.

But the more recent and more vivid work of Faure, which studies the
human spirit in artistic development as much as, or more than, the
technical variations, gives us the vital truth (ii, 284)

          The church of the clergy was too narrow and too dark, the
     crowd that was rising with the sound of a sea begged for a
     church of its own; it felt in itself the courage and the
     knowledge necessary to build that church to its own stature.
     Its desire was to have the whole great work of building pass,
     with the material and moral life, from the hands of the
     cloistered monk into those of the living people.

The effect of this was, he says in a line: "Christianity, which
until then had dominated life, was dominated by it and carried
along in the movement."

     Under the auspices of these three manuals, the most weighty
that the English-speaking reader can consult, I approach the
remainder of my task with confidence. The great art of the Middle
Ages began with its removal from clerical and monastic to lay
hands. It pleases Catholics, who, if they know anything about
history, refrain from mentioning the earlier Middle Ages, to call
the thirteenth century "the great Catholic century." It ought
really, in comparison with the preceding centuries, to be called
"the age of heresy." It opened with the awful massacre of the
Albigensians, and it set the Inquisition to discover and intimidate
heresy everywhere; yet even at its close; as Dante tells us about
Florence, heresy was very bold and rampant. Even on the wings of
Christendom, in England and Bohemia, this spirit so affected the
minds of men that presently the heresy of Wyclif and Hus would
sweep the countries.

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     All these things -- the Scholastic movement (a restricted
revival of intellectual life in Christendom), the rise of secular
schools and teachers and new secular literature, the foundation of
republics or democracies, the wide rebellion against clerical
control in art and thought -- are vitally interconnected. They
betoken a new spirit in Europe, and it is, in the strict sense of
the word, anti-Christian. It is an assertion of the rights of human
nature: of the flesh and of the intellect. Modern apologists
actually describe the teaching of the Albigensians and the Cathari
as "anti-social" because they urged celibacy and voluntary poverty,
as Christ had done! It means that Christendom was deserting Christ,
and the hounds of the Inquisition had to be let loose, largely upon
those who clung to Christ.

     The "economic interpretation of history," which is the most
solid and satisfying of interpretations, has never yet been fully
and frankly applied to this wonderful age, and it cannot be
expected in a short chapter like this, but I must give a few
indications. The invasions of robust and semi-barbaric peoples from
the north were over. Danes and Vikings had retired to their homes.
Normans or Norsemen had settled in new lands. The nations of modern
Europe had taken shape. Industry, commerce, and wealth emerge of
themselves in such conditions, and of themselves they lead to
artistic and intellectual activity.

     In my "Peter Abelard" I have minutely studied and described
the intellectual stirring of the first half of the twelfth century:
the network of busy provincial schools, the old monastic and
episcopal schools at Paris becoming a university, the crowd of
independent teachers and their pupils from all parts forming the
new Latin Quarter on the banks of the Seine. It is all, plainly, an
outgrowth of the new economic conditions. The Church on the whole
keeps control of it, but obviously did not inspire it. It is the
dawn of the kingdom of man: the real beginning of modern times long
before the Renaissance proper.

     While this largely meant an internal economic and political
development in Europe, it is a profound and very common error to
overlook the impulse given from without, especially by the Spanish
Moors. Abelard, when be was bayed at on every side by the narrow-
minded monks, thought of going to live in learned and tolerant
Spain. What brilliant lessons the Moors could give Europe! Here let
us note, gratefully, that the great intermediaries, the
broadcasters of their culture, were the Jews. Christendom has never
yet realized how much it owes to the Jews whom it so vilely
treated. In a less degree the Mohammedans influenced Europe by
contact with the Crusaders in Palestine; though knights were then,
as a rule, too boorish to take lessons in culture. And there was
repeatedly an importation of art, even if cramped and degenerate,
from the Greek world.

     It was a repetition of the story of the Greeks. They had come
down from the north, semi-barbarians, with their family of gods and
goddesses. They at last displayed a unique and superb art in making
temples for Zeus and Athene and the other deities, and carving
statues of them. But no one imagines that the religion was the
essential inspiration of the art. It merely provided themes. The


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Greeks had come into contact with the older civilizations, and they
made a civilization of their own; just as America has created a
civilization of its own and would create an art of its own.

     This must suffice to indicate, very sketchily, how and why
Europe begot a new spirit in the eleventh and twelfth centuries;
not a new religion, not even a new appreciation of its old religion
-- rather the contrary -- but a new, soaring, ambitious human
spirit. There is an interesting theory amongst architects
(developed in Leader Scott's "Cathedral Builders"), though it is
warmly disputed, that the old Roman architects took shelter in the
region of Como during the barbaric invasions, and kept up their
traditions there until Europe was comparatively settled and there
was a call for their work. It is said to have been the descendants
of these "free masons" who wrought the new architecture of Europe;
evolved the Romanesque out of the Roman, and the Gothic out of the
Romanesque. I have proved elsewhere that the Roman trade unions, or
Colleges of the workers, certainly survived into the Middle Ages
and were the forerunners of the Guilds.

     At all events it is universally admitted that the great age of
cathedral building opened with the transfer of the art from the
monks to laymen, to real artists unfettered by ascetic traditions.
Large and rich towns were now growing all over Europe, and the
burghers wanted fine churches. Dreamy religious writers love to
imagine that the art became great because of the theme. They were
to build a "house of God." It was a religious inspiration. But they
were just as "inspired" when they planned the civic buildings of
the new burghers. It is the same inspiration in the Clothiers' Hall
at Ypres, the Town Hall at Louvain, the Rathaus at Cologne, as in
the cathedrals of Rheims and Amiens. Give the artist a theme and he
works it out appropriately; but the theme does not create his art.

     You see this very plainly in the range or, so to say, output
of the new architects. We are not concerned here with technical
questions, and need note only that, according to all the modern
authorities, the Gothic was developed quite naturally and
laboriously out of the Roman through the Romanesque. All sorts of
fanciful theories of the origin of the Gothic have been published,
and the ordinary person, who knows it only in its finest specimens,
the greater cathedrals, is apt to imagine it as a sort of
revelation or miracle of religious inspiration. It was evolved as
prosaically as the automobile. A northern climate demanded a
different type of architecture from the south; just as you want a
different type of house in Minnesota and in southern Florida. They
wanted more light or larger windows, sloping roofs to ease the
masses of winter snow, and so on. In sheer mutual rivalry they
raised their churches higher and higher, until the strain on the
walls became serious, and the flying buttress was invented.

     In short, modern architects trace the whole gradual
development from the eleventh to the fourteenth century; though,
while the earlier or Romanesque style was developed in Saxony, the
Gothic was elaborated first in the region of Paris. The Rheims
cathedral is generally admitted to have been its most perfect
example, and has been called "the Parthenon of the Middle Ages."
Reber, who also regards it as the finest cathedral, says,


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nevertheless, that it does not compare with the work of the Greeks.
"It is," he says, "not of that absolute perfection which
characterizes the work of Iktinos and Phidias," the builders of the
Parthenon. Its sculptures, which are so much admired, are, he says,
"by no means entirely free from inequalities in composition, from
errors of proportion, and from exaggerations of facial
expressions." By the end of the thirteenth century the Gothic
architecture became too elaborate and degenerated. The whole story
is one of art, not religion.

     The entire story of this great medieval architecture is a
normal artistic episode. As the towns grow richer and the civic
life more important, the architects are ordered to build Guild
Halls, Town Halls and so on. These, where the money is available,
are just as beautiful as the cathedrals. And the inspiration droops
and fades just like the inspiration in any other golden age of art.
The religion remained just the same. Indeed, after the appalling
slaughter of heretics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
I should be inclined to say that Europe was more Christian at the
end of the great Gothic period than at its height.

     But the movement followed the ordinary laws of art. The genius
drooped. The new generation was content to imitate and was apt to
be too elaborate. And when the Reformation came, when men really
went back to the spirit and letter of Christ's message, art was
frozen as far as this really religious influence reached. If a
Catholic asks you why we cannot build these glorious cathedrals
today, or can only feebly imitate them, ask him why the great
Gothic period exhausted itself long before the Reformation.

                 THE PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

     The men of the earlier Middle Ages had certainly had blood in
their veins individually, but there had been no social veins, if I
may use the term, with a vigorous collective circulation. It was
when this social circulation and social wealth began that the
bourgeoisie demanded art, and an art nearer to their own mood.
Sculpture followed architecture into the hands of the laity. The
saints and saintesses, even the devils and angels and Christ and
Mary, became human. A little of the human joy of the more
prosperous age was reflected on their features. Human models were
used for them, and busts and limbs were rounded. Humanity was
breathed into the older sculpture, and it began to rise toward the
ancient Greek level. Perhaps some would say that in the sculpture
of Michelangelo it reached that level. I do not know. But most
experts say not; and it is significant that while joy in the real
human form made medieval sculpture great, the Greek statuary was
even greater, because it found its inspiration in the nude human
form, in beautiful courtesans and athletic youths.

     And this, according to all the authorities -- and it will
occur to any thoughtful person -- is the clue to medieval painting.
It is not really medieval at all. Luebke, one of the chief
authorities, includes the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in his
section in "Modern Art." The result is that of medieval painters he
can mention only Cimabue, Giotto and two or three others, who
either clung to the old conventional models or began the revolt


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against them. They are, he says, "the heralds who announce the dawn
of a new day." But the new day, with all the great painters whose
names are familiar to everybody, belongs to modern times. I have
called them the painters of the Renaissance, and this again reminds
us that they flourished in the least religious part of the Middle
Ages.

     The very date will be convincing to every reader who knows a
little about history, but let me again quote the leading
authorities to show that in slighting earlier painting and claiming
that humanization made it great I am saying nothing new or
disputable. Luebke, who makes all the great painters moderns, says:
"During the Middle Ages the creations of art had been very largely
controlled by traditional -- chiefly ecclesiastical -- habits of
thought."

     Woltmann and Woermann, perhaps the leading authorities on the
history of painting in particular, say curtly in their "History of
Painting" that up to the middle of the thirteenth century painting
and sculpture in Europe were "the painting and sculpture of
children," that after the thirteenth century painting "emancipated
itself from priestly dictation," and that it was in the least
Christian and most immoral period of Italy that "the highest
beauty, which the gods themselves had, two thousand years before,
revealed to the Greeks, now revisited earth among the Italians."
Could there be a more scathing comment on the Roman Catholic claim
than this plain statement of fact of two of the highest authorities
on the subject?

     Dr. von Reber entirely agrees, and the highest authority on
the period, J. Addington Symonds, is just as emphatic in his
monumental work, "The Renaissance in Italy." "Painting in the
earlier period," he says, "suffered from a barren scholasticism."
It consisted of "frigid reproductions of lifeless forms, copied
technically, and without inspiration, from debased patterns." The
next step was that the artist "humanized the altar-pieces and
cloister frescoes," and "piety, at the lure of art, folded her
soaring wings, and rested on the genial earth." So say all the
authorities, while petty controversialists and pious writers would
have you believe that it was art which soared at the lure of piety.
In fine, confronting the great art of Raphael and Michelangelo,
both Christians giving superb or exquisite form to Christian ideas,
Symonds still ascribes their inspiration to their humanity, not
their religion: "For the painters of the full Renaissance Roman
martyrs and Olympian deities were alike burghers of one spiritual
city, the city of the beautiful and the human."

     The general development is clear and familiar. Painting
remained stiff and unnatural long after architecture and sculpture,
because, says Reber, "its dependence upon the libraries and schools
of the convents was much longer continued than was that of
architecture and sculpture." The revolt -- the approach to nature
and life -- began with Cimabue, who, being a pioneer, did not lead
it far. It was his pupil, Giotto, the founder of the Florentine
School, who first, about the end of the thirteenth century, boldly
"substituted his own observation of nature for outworn forms." If
he had to paint a St. Joseph or a St. Peter, in other words, he did


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not look up the conventional figures in illuminated missats or
altar-panels, but brought to his studio a burly Florentine
carpenter or fisherman.

     So the new note was struck, and it slowly reverberated through
Italy. Florence now afforded the material conditions of art:
wealth, sensuality, and a wholesome skepticism. Other Italian
cities overtook it, and had their schools of painters. In the
fifteenth century Constantinople fell to the Turks, and hosts of
Greek artists fled to Italy. The Renaissance -- the Rebirth of
classic art as well as literature -- set in, and enforced the
humanizing movement. Most of Europe was successively lit up, and a
great literature or a great art appeared in many countries.

     Pictures for the new beautiful churches, for popes and bishops
and abbeys, were the most in demand and the most profitable, so
that the painters of the earlier period have chiefly occupied
themselves with sacred subjects. The artists did not paint a
Virgin-and-Child, a Nativity, a St. Lawrence, because they felt a
religious urge or inspiration in them, but because they were
commissioned to paint them. The life of each of the great artists
of the time is a series of journeys to execute commissions. If a
secular ruler, a cardinal, or a pope wanted his portrait painted,
the inspiration was just the same.

     The only point that any informed person can seriously raise
about the relation of these artistic geniuses to religion, apart
from the obvious fact that religion employed them, is to what
extent in certain individual artists the Christian faith increased
or enhanced the inspiration. Small as a restricted claim like this
would be -- relatively to the foolish common boast that
"Christianity inspired medieval art" -- no authority on art would
admit that Raphael or Michelangelo would have done less princely
work if the fashion of painting or carving sacred subjects had
passed and they were confined to mythology and life and history.
The painters of the Renaissance who did actually paint mythological
scenes and contemporary life painted to the height of their faculty
just as the religious painters did. Even Fra Argelico, being an
artist of genius, would have put as much inspiration into the
painting of the improper frescoes on the walls of certain houses in
Pompeii, had that been his task, as he actually infused into the
pious frescoes in the walls of his monastery.

     The period, the whole complexus of circumstances which I have
described, evoked a succession of great artists, and they painted
what their clients wanted. The same artists painted what are called
obscene and what are called sincerely religious pictures. Fra
Filippo Lippi, the renegade monk, did a very large number of
beautiful paintings on the walls of churches. Why not? He merely,
says Luebke, "placed sacred images and events on the footing of
everyday life." He could, as well as any, give his saint the
ecstatic expression or give his Christ the proper air of majesty.
Botticelli, whose religious pictures are famous, painted pagan
myths and allegories no less beautifully. Pinturicchio, notoriously
immoral and skeptical, has left a superb fresco in the Vatican of
Pope Alexander VI (as immoral as himself) worshiping the risen
Savior with an expression of piety that could hardly be surpassed.


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And on another wall of the Vatican there used to be a most tender
and devout representation of the Virgin Mary which was a portrait
of the damsel who at the time was the Pope's mistress, wantoning
with him in the Vatican every night.

     The Roman School of painting -- of painters who were not
Romans -- was one of the latest. The center of Christendom, as I
said, had no great art until it became semi-pagan. It was a series
of Popes, who, when they were not themselves immoral, surrounded
themselves with utterly corrupt courts, who "inspired" the great
art of Rome; and the funds for the work were derived from the most
unscrupulous exploitation of the superstitions of Europe. It was
under these immoral Popes, in an atmosphere of unbounded license
and semi-pagan ideas, that Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Perugino,
Pinturicchio, Raphael, and Michelangelo worked. Without that
atmosphere Rome would never have become the museum of art that it
is. Aphrodite, Apollo, and Dionysos had more share than Christian
ideas in the production.














               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929






















                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               400