of our patron, the venerable and glorious St Luke," &c. Several subsequent rules relate to the observance of other festivals, whereof fifty-seven are enjoined to be strictly kept without working, a number which, added to Sundays and Easter holidays, monopolises for sacred purposes nearly a third of the year.[107] The Florentine statutes, dated about twenty years earlier, direct that all who come to enrol themselves in the Company of painters, whether men or women, shall be penitent and confessed, or at least shall purpose to confess themselves at the earliest opportunity; that they shall daily repeat five paternosters, and as many aves, and shall take the sacrament at least once a year.[108] Nor let these be regarded as mere unmeaning phrases, or as the vapid lip-service of a formalist faith. The ceremonial observances of an age in which the Roman Church was indeed Catholic cannot fairly be judged by a Protestant standard, yet few, who have seen with intelligence the productions of those painters, will doubt that they were men of piety and prayer. A vestige of the same holy feeling hung over artists, even after it had ceased to animate their efforts; the forms survived, when the spirit had fled. Thus, "On Tuesday morning, the 11th of June 1573, at eleven in the forenoon, Giorgio Vasari began to paint the cupola of the cathedral at Florence; and, before commencing, he had a Mass of the Holy Spirit celebrated at the altar of the sacrament, after hearing which he entered upon the work."[109] Vasari was a religious man; but the favourite painter of a dissolute court could scarcely be a religious artist, nor could the pupil of Michael Angelo appreciate the quiet pathos or feel the gentle fervour of earlier and more spiritualised times. [Footnote 107: _Carteggio d'Artisti_, II., p. 1.] [Footnote 108: _Carteggio d'Artisti_, II., p. 33.] [Footnote 109: _Ibid._, III., p. 352.] In Spain, where art was always in the especial service of the priesthood, and not unfrequently subservient to priestcraft, religion was a requisite of painters to a much later date. The rules of the academy established at Seville by Murillo, in 1658, imposed upon each pupil an ejaculatory testimony of his faith in, and devotion for, the blessed sacrament and immaculate conception.[110] But whilst the piety of the Sienese and Florentine guilds was an inherent sentiment of their age, willingly adopted by professional etiquette, that of the Iberian artists in the sixteenth century was regulated by the Inquisition, and savoured of its origin. The former was joyous as the bright thoughts of youthful enthusiasm springing in a land of beauty; the latter shadowed the grave and sombre temperament of the nation by austerities congenial to the Holy Office. Hence the religious paintings of Spain, appealing to the spectator's terrors rather than to his sympathies, revelled in the horrible, eschewing as a snare those lovely forms which in Italy were encouraged as conducive to devotion.