Mediæval painting, for example, was exceedingly rigid, dry, and conventional. The effort of the ecclesiastical painters was merely to symbolize religious truths; they were like chroniclers, who aim at narrating facts, rather than like ballad-writers and minstrels who are interested also in the beauty of their language, the richness, charm, and intrinsic appeal of their images and phraseology. But by imperceptible degrees, led on by the natural human delight in shapeliness of form and luxury of color, and learning to make the skill acquired in delineation subserve the higher and more immediate purposes of art, the painters of the Renaissance gradually substituted for this merely symbolic treatment a broader one, in which human beauty was as much sought as religious edification. The nude figure was lovingly studied, not because the saints happened to be men, but because men are beautiful. Garments, draperies, fabrics received a new attention, in the interests, not of historical accuracy, but of the intrinsic pleasantness of textures and tints. Postures were softened, adjusted, made less angular and uncompromising than in the almost chart-like early frescoes. Atmosphere, chiaroscuro, composition, balance, were deemed worthy of the efforts of painters who considered art an end in itself. Eventually, by the great pictures of the Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan masters, all the human faculties were called into harmonious activity; the eye was delighted, the feelings were wooed and stimulated, the imagination was touched and informed. “Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority,” says J. A. Symonds,[18] “instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, [art] really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to prove the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.” Whether painting, which thus by insistence on the intrinsic values of its medium attained maturity, then carried the process too far, and lost roundness and balance by prizing mere richness of color above all else, whether, in a word, its consummation was followed by a decadence, is a question too large for discussion here. But it is beyond doubt that painting went through the first three phases of growth pointed out as the results in art of an idealistic impulse.