Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/35

 I] INTRODUCTION 17 lyric forms of poetry which the classic spirit, with sure discrimination, had devised to meet the several requirements of its different moods. More slowly and, at first, less articulately than in poetry, this same freeing of the spirit will show itself in architecture, sculpture, and painting: in architecture, as, after the creation of the Byzantine dome and the tentative progress of the Romanesque, the Gothic finally at- tains, and the vast church lifts the worshipper to the freedom of God's infinite heaven; in sculpture, as the carver learns to cover the cathedral with the illimitable story of creation, of man's Fall and his Re- demption, of human life and its devilish besettings, and of the final Judgment unto heaven or hell ; in painting, as the artist learns to tell in color this boundless Christian tale and at last to depict with subtilty the beatitudes and sorrows of the Christian souL