§ 4 Religion and Art
On one line, happily, the Church of the Renaissance was able to do a service to civilization while following its own ends. Among the apophthegms which stand critical tests is that to the effect that art has always been the handmaid of religion. So true is it that even Protestant Christianity, which at its start set its face against all pictorial expression of religious ideas, is in our own time visibly much indebted to art for the preservation and cultivation of religious sentiment.
In antiquity, save in the anti-idolatrous cults, religion had been the great patron of imitative art, inasmuch as it made the most constant economic demand for sculptures and paintings. This law held good from Hindostan to Rome; and even Judaism and Mazdeism had perforce to subsidize architecture. That common need for splendid temples preserved architectural ideals in Byzantium when the art of the higher sculpture had utterly disappeared; and as the loss of skill in sculpture, no less than the old aversion to statues as symbols of paganism, prevented activity on that line, the Byzantines devoted themselves to the carving and painting of wooden icons, and to mosaics, pictures, and manuscript illuminations, for religious purposes. The results were constrained and unprogressive; but hence, in the Dark Ages, and during the short-lived Latin empire of Constantinople, came the models for the first pictorial art of Italy; and from that beginning, under the economic encouragement given by a priesthood whose wealth was always increasing, and whose churches and palaces constantly gained in splendour, came the immense artistic flowering of the Renaissance. After the Reformation had cut off half the sources of Italian ecclesiastical wealth, and Spanish rule had begun to ruin industry, the artistic life of Italy rapidly died away; even as in Protestant Holland, where the economic demand was non-clerical, coming mainly from a wealthy trading class who sought portraits and secular pictures, there was a rapid decline from the period of political and economic contraction.
It needed, however, the conditions of free civic life, such as prevailed in the earlier part of the Renaissance, to raise ecclesiastical art from the bondage of convention in which it had been kept by the Byzantine Church, as by the priesthood of ancient Egypt. It was the multiform intellectual competition of the Italian States in their period of free growth, and even under their native despots, that bred artistic spirits such as those who perpetually widened the bounds of the arts of colour and form, from Giotto to Michel Angelo and Titian.
Under equivalent conditions took place the great evolution of architectural art in France and northern Europe. It was mainly the economic demand of the Church that evolved the admirable architecture called “Gothic”—a misnomer first applied by the later artificial taste which could see beauty only in classical symmetry, and disdained the wild grace and power of the medieval architecture as mere barbarism. It was really a special development of artistic faculty. Modern fancy has ascribed to the guilds of cathedral-builders on the one hand a passion for occult lore, supposed to be the source of the modern mummery of “Freemasonry,” and on the other hand a deep religious feeling, of which the cathedral is supposed to be the expression. How far this is from the truth may be gathered from a closer study of their sculptures in many of the older cathedrals and churches, which reveal not only a riotous irreverence and indecency, but at times a positive derision for the faith. Nonetheless, organized Christianity had, by its demand for their work, provided a wonderful artistic environment for a cult which could no more than those of antiquity evolve a humanity worthy of beautiful things.