nevertheless deficient in moral power, and when tried in the furnace of adversity was found wanting. With institutions whose freedom had no longer vitality, with rulers intent only on selfish ends, and with citizens relaxed in principle and knit by no common political ties, the very advantages lavished upon her by nature and civilisation proved her bane, attracting spoilers whom she was powerless to resist. Melancholy is the thought that all her mental superiority was ineffectual for her defence; but yet more humiliating the fact that those on whom nature's best gifts were showered, and who were foremost as protectors of literature and the arts, were often, by their fatal example, chief promoters of the general demoralisation. No wonder then that she fell, and in her fall presented a signal lesson to future times "of the impotence of human genius and of the instability of human institutions, however excellent in themselves, when unsustained by public and private virtue."[101] [Footnote 100: Hodoeporicon and Epistola, _passim_.] [Footnote 101: PRESCOTT'S _Ferdinand and Isabella_.] CHAPTER XXVI Mediæval art chiefly religious--Innovations of Naturalism, Classicism, and Paganism--character and tendencies of Christian painting ill understood in England--influence of St. Francis--Mariolatry. In order to comprehend the peculiar tendency which painting assumed in Umbria, it will be necessary briefly to examine the principles and history of what is now generally known under the denomination of CHRISTIAN ART.[*102] Until after the revival of European civilisation, painting had scarcely any other direction than religious purposes. For household furniture and decoration, its luxuries were unheard of; the delineation of nature in portraits and landscapes was unknown. But pictorial representations had been employed for embellishment of churches from the recognition of Christianity by the Emperors of the West, and they had assumed a conventional character, derived chiefly from rude tracings in which the uncultivated limners of an outcast sect had long before depicted Christ, his Mother, and his apostles, for the solace of those whose proscribed creed drove them to worship in the catacombs. When these delineations, originally cherished as emblems of faith, had been employed as the adjuncts, and eventually perverted into the objects of devotion, they acquired a sacred character which it was the tendency of ever-spreading superstition continually to exaggerate. They became, in fact, the originals of those pictures which in subsequent ages were adopted as part and portion of the Roman worship; and forms, which they derived perhaps from the fancy or caprice of their inventors, came to be the received types to which all orthodox painters were bound to adhere.[*103] The means adopted for repeating them were enlarged or narrowed by various circumstances; the success with which they were imitated