Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/220

198 decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of the fleshless consumptive refinements of the pale mediæval artists. That high indifference to the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of the corpse in it; we see already Angelico and the 'Master of the Passion' in the artistic future. The crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the flesh-outstripping interest, is already traceable. Those abstracted gods, 'ready to melt out their essence fine into the winds,' who can fold up their flesh as a garment, and remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleak air in which, like Helen of Troy herself, they wander as the spectres of the middle age.

Gradually as the world came into the church, as Christianity compromised its earlier severities, the native artistic interest reasserted its claims. But Christian art was still dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later times working the disused amphitheatres as quarries. The sensuous expression of conceptions which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate problem which Christian art had before it. If we think of mediæval painting as it ranges from the early German