picture, the spiritual expression in the face of the Christ is an utter disappointment. In sculpture, from Michael Angelo to Thorwaldsen, we turn away with a sad shock to expectation. Even the Pietà in St. Peter's, which redeems Michael Angelo from the naturalistic forms in the Sistine Chapel and in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, is yet far from enough. Still we must be thankful for what we have, as in Leonardo's somewhat traditional head, and in works so full of earnest life as Angelico's series of some of the great moments in the Saviour's history in the Academy at Florence, and Duccio's in the Cathedral of Sienna.* Even from pictures that we feel to be imperfect, how much we gain, to what inner depths of feeling do we seem admitted, if the painter has only poured out his soul upon them! A look is with us still from a face of Christ over the tribune of the church of a monastery on the ascent from the town of Albano to its Lake. The church, otherwise empty, seemed full of the presence of him who said, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God." There was no one of whom to ask a question. We sought out a friar, who said that the picture was Guercino's; but he spoke as of a matter that did not greatly interest him, and we think he must have erred. What fullness of teaching more than from all commentaries, what correction of all littleness, what transformation of feeling, what a new sense of the alliance of the divine goodness with the nature of man, would come to us from a "Life of Christ" presented with the right expression through the eyes to the soul! Christianity is not yet spiritual enough, and Art is not yet perfect enough, for that Evangel to be delivered to man; but it will be accomplished yet. It is reserved, with many other things, for the Church of the Future. What is now conveyed to us in some few pictures, as in a Crucifixion by Cigoli, where, whilst all that is merely physical is most solemnly present in the mysterious shadow in which it seems to be withdrawn, spiritual expression actually radiates from the pallor of the brow,— may enable us to conceive what such a full revelation would be. Even representations proceeding from conceptions of Religion not our own, often affect us with a strange realising power. Who does not feel for the moment a new confidence in the might of goodness, in the rush of the bright Seraph on the dark form of Satan? And who can look upon the Angel of the Resurrection† sitting on the tomb, and waiting for the signal to blow the trumpet, without feeling that it might sound ere our suspended breath returned? As an example of the new emotions and experiences,

*Engraved and published under the editorship of the late Dr. Emil Braun, secretary to the Prussian Archæological Society, Rome; a man of profound learning and knowledge of Art, but adorned by still higher gifts of spiritual insight. †The work of Tenerani.

of the new sense of the indwelling of God in man and woman, communicated by religious pictures even to one who does not participate in the conceptions which perhaps raised those pictures to so divine a beauty,—we take the following description of the Madonna di San Sisto :

"The curtain which, painted in the picture, flanks the figures on each side, significantly marks the subject as a mystery.-The action has no scene, no footing on earth: floating among the clouds angels and glorified saints adore the Mother and her Son. From the foot of the picture look up two half-seen figures of lovely cherub-infants, in calm and unimpassioned worship. At each side kneels a saint: on one hand a youthful female martyr; on the other an aged Roman bishop. The beautiful maiden turns away from the splendour of the opening vision, to look, softly smiling, on the angel children: the venerable priest wears his white tunic and gold-weaved robe; but the triple mitre, the ensign of power, is laid at his feet, and the old man's gray and crownless head is turned upwards motionless and adoring. Above, from amidst a throng of cherub faces shining through the golden beams of the dawning, issues the holy Mother, bearing in her arms the divine Child. Her attitude is inconceivably majestic: she treads not on the cloud; it bears her forward. Her youthful head is loveliness become divine; the sweet countenance is quietly and solemnly happy; trouble has touched the deep eyes, but left scarcely a shadow there; and on the features dwell grace to men, and love to the holy Infant, who, reposing on her bosom, looks forward with prophetic eyes, too deeply expressive for any childhood but that of divinity incarnate, and foreseeing agony and final triumph." Spalding's Italy, vol. iii. 345.

We add this testimony of the impression produced upon him, from one whose separate description of the picture itself, with more effusion of feeling, is much less accurate :

"Never before by any like production had I been quite abashed and overcome. I could except to, and study, and compare, other pictures this passed my understanding. Long did I inspect, and often did I go back to re-examine this mystery, which so foiled my criticism, and constrained my wonder, and convinced me as nothing visible beside had ever done, that if no picture is to be worshipped, something is to be worshipped; that is to be worshipped which such a picture indicates and portrays. But the problem was too much for my solving. I can only say, it mixed for me the transport of wonder with the ecstasy of delight; it affected me like the sign of a miracle; it was the supernatural put into colour and form; for certainly no one who received the suggestion of those features, the sense of those meek, subduing eyes, could doubt any longer, if he had ever once doubted, of there being a God, a heaven, and both before and beyond the sepulchre an immortal life. No one who caught that supernal expression of the whole countenance could believe it was made of matter, born of mortality, had its first beginning in the cradle, or could be laid away in the grave, but rather that it was of a quite dateless and everlasting tenure. I would

be free even to declare that in the light which played between those lips and lids, was Christianity itself,-Christianity in miniature, for the smallness of the space I might incline to express it, but that I should query in what larger presentment I had ever beheld Christianity so great. Mont Blanc may fall out of the memory, and the Pass of the Stelvio pass away; but the argument for religion,-argument I call it, -which was offered to my mind in the great Madonna of Raphael, cannot fail." Pictures of Europe, &c. p. 204.

There is an objection often, but ignorantly, made to the employment of religious Art, that by embodying a spiritual ideal it arrests its development, stops further growth within the imagination, and that so Art may petrify sentiment just as Creeds stiffen thought. There is no analogy whatever between the two cases, any more than there is between poetry and formal logic. Whatever is addressed to sentiment will perpetually awaken fresh sentiment; and it is the very essence of its genius that for ever and for ever it creates and calls forth more than it expresses. Theology may pretend to present to the intellect the ultimate form of truth, and the intellect may perish under an acceptance of the offer; but Art is guilty of no such presumption-it offers the best that it has only as a gleam of the unapproachable Beauty, and presents it to the creative powers of imagination and feeling, not to satisfy but to kindle their own conceptions. It is only when Art is dead, shut up in traditional types, that this evil attends her. The Art that is alive, that at any time was alive, that ever gushed fresh from a great soul, will always be alive, and quicken fresh life perpetually. We might as well complain of the everlasting hills that they limited our sentiment of God, as complain of a great ideal picture that it defines the indefinable. It is, in fact, a stimulus to faculties that are inexhaustible, in a direction that is unlimited. Nor is there any weight in another objection that Art, having more power to represent the contemplative than the active side of life, may fix a false type of the perfect religious character in the conceptions of men. For this might be said of all the religious aids that carry us into the presence of God-the fountain of all goodness, loveliness, and greatness. They all conduct to contemplation as the nurse of inspiration-the undefiled source in which all great purposes of action, all thoughts of high sacrifice, must have their rise; and, in fact, the whole of religious history shows that the saint is the hero, that whoever outwardly acts above the world must inwardly dwell above the world. We might as well complain of Gethsemane that it did not exhibit the open testimony and the mighty powers of the Judgment-hall and Calvary; whilst in fact the Judgment-hall and Calvary were already encountered and conquered in that solitary prayer. It is true that Art can only give

one expression at a time of the human aspects of Religion; but all the spiritual forces may be there in presence, under that one aspect, and each of them in its season the very medicine of the soul. It is as needful to us, betimes, to see the face of the hermit, the serene face of happy solitude, of inward contentment, and of rest in God, as to catch the eye of the good soldier of Jesus Christ.

We

Mr. Ruskin, in a remarkable note appended to his Lamps of Architecture-remarkable as a testimony to the importance and the difficulties of the question-has laid down the whole groundplan of the subject we have been imperfectly dealing with. have reserved the passage, because it is a ground-plan that we are not capable of building upon. And we give it now both for the sake of its healthy cautions, and that by its suggestions and directions, our readers may at least have the benefit of its masterly outline of a fuller survey:

"Much attention has lately been directed to the subject of religious art, and we are now in possession of all kinds of interpretations and classifications of it, and of the leading facts of its history. But the greatest question of all connected with it remains entirely unanswered, What good did it do to real religion? There is no subject into which I should so much rejoice to see a serious and conscientious inquiry instituted as this; an inquiry undertaken neither in artistical enthusiasm nor in monkish sympathy, but dogged, merciless, and fearless. I love the religious art of Italy as well as most men; but there is a wide difference between loving it as a manifestation of individual feeling, and looking to it as an instrument of popular benefit. I have not knowledge enough to form even the shadow of an opinion on this latter point, and I should be most grateful to any one who would put it in my power to do so. There are, as it seems to me, three distinct questions to be considered. The first, What has been the effect of external splendour on the genuineness and earnestness of Christian worship? The second, What the use of pictorial or sculptural representation in the communication of Christian historical knowledge, or excitement of affectionate imagination? The third, What the influence of the practice of religious art on the life of the artist?

In answering these inquiries, we should have to consider separately every collateral influence and circumstance; and, by a most subtle analysis, to eliminate the real effect of art from the effects of the abuses with which it was associated. This could be done only by a Christian; not a man who would fall in love with a sweet colour or sweet expression, but who would look for true faith and consistent life as the object of all. It never has been done yet, and the question remains a subject of vain and endless contention between parties of opposite prejudices and temperaments." Seven Lamps of Architecture, second edition, p. 201.

We are utterly incompetent to the inquiry here mapped out,

and have directed our remarks not to the historical investigation and analysis, but rather to the kind of beneficial relations which Art is capable of sustaining towards Religion. That there are such relations, whatever be their exact limitations, cannot be doubted. The interests into which Churches now pour their most eager life, furnish no objects to Art. There is no universal agreement as to what it is in Christianity that is to be most intensely loved and realised; nothing, therefore, that can give inspiration, or take form, within the musing heart. We are far from the time, and farther from the feelings of the time, when a Picture worthily embodying a conception dear to the heart of a whole people could raise such emotions of enthusiasm that the part of the town whence it issued from the painter's studio is called to this day, though it is more than five hundred years ago, Borgo Allegri, the District of Joy. These feelings, with their then directions, never can return. Art made the most of them, and exhausted them, and died in their exhaustion. When she revives, it will be with an inspiration that shall never pass away. For the present, Theology, with its notional distinctions, every where prevails over that human impersonation of Religion which is the highest object of Art, as it was the only perfect embodiment of Revelation. But whenever it shall come to be universally felt that Christianity is the life of Christ-that Christianity is Christ-the glory of God in the face of Man, God manifest in the flesh-then religious Art shall be called-in a new spirit, and with a reverence for human nature, the very nature given to it to represent, never before known upon the carth-to an inexhaustible work. We have only to wait for a universal Christian realism, for the most glorious Art to take its rise. Whether in the solemn assemblies where the spirit of a man is to kindle and instruct the spirits of his fellows, the formative Arts are to be perpetual ministers, as presenting the nearest symbols of the presence of God in human nature, or whether, as fixing thought too much upon themselves, they are to be reserved for private excitement and delight in churches or elsewhere, we do not know, but there is a clear boundary which they cannot pass. Their sphere is man, not God. There need be no fear that the spirituality of Religion will not be jealously, reverently guarded. Art will ever know her own province. Architecture and Music, as of indefinite expression, may wing the soul to the Most High; Painting and Sculpture will give us more and more the visible presence of the Image of God in man. And when the universal heart of Christendom shall rest upon the intuitions of holy beauty that find their objective forms in the perfection of Jesus Christ through all the manifestations of his spirit, and the whole Church is at one as to what it loves and places first as the expo