The whole fabric of Greek art goes to pieces when it is brought into contact with a purely utilitarian nation like Rome. It succeeded in humanizing and educating the upper classes, but it had little effect on the mob. Art, therefore, in Rome became a means of decorating palaces and not a national treasure. The contact with Christianity was even more destructive, for if the Romans had been merely indifferent, the Christians were actively hostile. The new religion was Semitic in origin, and cared nothing for beauty or ugliness. If anything, it found in ugliness a means of atonement for sin. The Greek love of beauty was the worst enemy Christianity encountered, and the Fathers direct long pamphlets and arguments against the pagan deities and their statues. Nor were they content with arguments, when they could wield a hammer or throw a stone. Early Christianity, like Mohammedanism or the Spartan system, depended on a strict subordination of the individual, and consequently attacked most bitterly the artistic spirit which must be free if it is to live at all. Of all the nations who have existed since the fall of Greece the Chinese and Japanese have come nearest to the Greek spirit in art owing to the lack of a religion of self-denial. The earlier period of the Renaissance was also Hellenic, but when artists were captured by the Church and turned to painting saints and madonnas, their Greek freedom left them. Parrhasios might have claimed kinship with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or his Pallas; he would have seen no beauty in his Madonnas. Another consequence of the vital importance of art in Greek life was that artistic expression was almost wholly confined to the human form. Just as we exclude animals and plants from our religion, the Greek excluded them from his art as long as its religious connexion was intact. Between the sixth century and the Hellenistic age no Greek artist paid any attention to any animal save the horse, whose human associations exempted him, and even the horse had to be content with a more or less conventional treatment. Greek art, like Greek religion, is essentially anthropomorphic.