"Though Sculpture and Painting arose early in Italy, and arose with the mantle of the Christian religion about them, it was centuries before they were able to put on their full lustre and beauty. For this, various causes may be assigned. 1. The nations, or rather wild hordes, who ruled where consuls and emperors once reigned, ruled but for a little while, or were continually employed in expeditions of bloodshed and war. 2. The armed feet of the barbarians had trodden into dust all of art that was elegant or beautiful:--they lighted their camp-fires with the verses of Euripides or Virgil; they covered their tents with the paintings of Protogenes and Apelles, and they repaired the breaches in the walls of a besieged city, with the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles;--the desires of these barbarians were all barbarous. 3. Painting and Sculpture had to begin their labors anew; all rules were lost; all examples, particularly of the former, destroyed: men unable, therefore, to drink at the fountains of Greece, did not think, for centuries, of striking the rock for themselves. 4. The Christian religion, for which Art first wrought, demanded sentiment rather than shape: it was a matter of mind which was wanted: the personal beauty of Jesus Christ is nowhere insisted upon in all the New Testament: the earliest artists, when they had impressed an air of holiness or serenity on their works, thought they had done enough; and it was only when the fears of looking like the heathen were overcome, and a sense of the exquisite beauty of Grecian sculpture prevailed, that the geometrical loveliness of the human form found its way into art. It may be added, that no modern people, save the Italians alone, seem to share fully in the high sense of the ideal and the poetic, visible in the works of Greece.