but figures that distract one's faith and devotion; but I hope that God will one day send his saints to cast down such idolatries."[113] In a land where mythology had slowly been supplanted by revelation, especially in a city successively the capital of paganism and Christianity, these influences were necessarily in frequent antagonism, or in forced and unseemly juxtaposition. Whilst art thus lost in sentiment, it gained in vigour; and although classic taste and the study of antique sculpture unquestionably tarnished its mystical purity, may they not have preserved it from the fate of religious painting in Spain, which, debarred by the Inquisition from access to nude models, and elevated by no refined standard, oscillated between the extremes of gloomy asceticism and grovelling vulgarity? The paganism of the Medici and Michael Angelo scared away the seraphic visions of monastic limners, but it also rescued Italy from religious prudery, and saved men from addressing their orisons to squalid beggars.[*114] [Footnote *112: For instance, in the work of Botticelli, I suppose, or Verrocchio, or Mantegna?] [Footnote 113: GAYE, _Carteggio_, II., 500.] [Footnote *114: Can this be an allusion to S. Francesco of Assisi?] The brief sketch which we have thus introduced of the progress and tendency of Christian art, may be fittingly concluded by the definition of it supplied by Baron v. Rumohr, one of the laborious, learned, and felicitous expositors of mediæval art whom the reviving taste of later times produced. "It is consecrated to religion alone; its object is sometimes to induce the mind to the contemplation of sacred subjects, sometimes to regulate the passions, by awakening those sentiments of peace and benevolence which are peculiar to practical Christianity." To narrate its extinction in the sixteenth century, speedily followed by the decline of all that was noblest in artistic genius, is a task on which we are not now called to enter. We approached the subject because, in the mountains of Umbria, that mystic school long maintained its chief seat; because there its types sank deepest into the popular mind; and because it reached its culminating point of perfection and glory in RAFFAELE of URBINO.