For centuries art revelled in the reproduction of symbolical crows, eagles, peacocks, doves, gridirons, pitchers, beehives, oxen, pigs, bulls, geese, violins, fishes, &c., as the attributes of St. Sebastian, St. John, Sta. Barbara, St. Thomas of Aquin, St. Cyprian, St. Narcissus, St. Bernard, St. Sebaldus, St. Anthony, St. Martin, St. Genesius, St. Chrysogonus, &c. A whole science arose out of these symbols and emblems: _Iconology_, which differs only in form from mythology. The mere phenomena of nature were no longer embodied; the individual spirit that lived in the form, became all in all. We were thus introduced to a two-fold world by Christian art. (1) Into a spiritual world, in which our intellect moved, as it were, in a circle. We took our beginning in the infinite, lost our transitory bodily form, and returned to the infinite from which we emanated--a kind of idealisation of the corporeal. (2) A world of external forms, which in their individual phenomena had only a meaning as the fragile temporary vessels of the eternal Spirit; this Spirit was no longer a universal sum total by which the individual was hereafter absorbed, but was assumed to remain _individualised_ through all eternity. Artists and men worked not only for this world, but their deeds were to outlast all time to come. In this two-fold world, Christian art went through the following phases:-- (_a_) Through a _historical_ phase, which commenced with Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, as the new central point of all things. The eternal Spirit was embodied, worked in a finite form, and freed from it, regained its absolute divinity. This led in time to sublime historical sketches in sculpture and painting. (_b_) Through a _religious_ phase. The spirit, freed and redeemed by Christ, sought in deeds of harmonious love totally new spheres of action. Crystals, flowers, trees, landscapes, animals and men, were interwoven to proclaim not only outward beauty, as with the Greeks, but a union of the inorganic and the organic, the ancient and the new worlds, in honour of one God in three emanations or personifications.