Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/32

18 But we have not shown as much diligence in applying Medieval Literature to the illustration of contemporary Medieval Art as the Classical Archaeologist has shown in comparing mythology and mythography.

Christian Iconography and Christian Symbolism must be read, as Lord Lindsay has read them, with the illustration of the lives of the saints, the theology and the poetry of the Middle Ages. We must study the Pisan Campo Santo with Dante in our hands.

In these remarks on the figurative language of Art, I have not attempted to lay down for your guidance systems and canons of interpretation; I have rather called your attention to the example of classical art in which a particular method of study has been long and successfully carried out.

Nor have I at all alluded to a most essential part of the History of Art, the tradition of its Figurative and Symbolic language from race to race; or shown how far the Mythography of the Greeks was modified by, and contributed in turn to modify, the Oriental and Egyptian Mythographies; how Roman Pantheism gradually absorbed into itself all these motley elements: how the earlier Christian Art, like the architecture, law, language and literature of medieval Christendom, was full of adapted Paganism; how, not forgetting the power of deep-rooted associations, it borrowed the symbols of an extinct idolatry, as medieval literature borrowed the imagery of the classical writers: how long the influence of that symbolism and that imagery has survived, affecting, in a peculiar manner, the view of physical nature both in art and poetry; and how, lastly, the great features of the landscape which ancient sculpture and poetry translated into a peculiar figurative language, have been, so to speak, retranslated in the painting and the poetry of an age of physical science like our own.

It remains for me to say a few words on other branches of Imitative Art. There is an ideal art which is not devoted to religion, but purely secular in its subject-matter and purpose, just as there is a secular poetry which gradually prevails over the religious poetry of an earlier age; but the portion of this secular ideal art of which Archaeology has to take cognisance is comparatively small.

Again, there is Historical art, or that which represents real events in history; and Portraiture, which, taken in its widest