The truth of this principle as a fundamental canon of ecclesiastical art is not essentially affected by the fact that it is only in certain periods and under favorable conditions that it has been strictly enforced. Whenever art reaches a certain point in development, individual determination invariably succeeds in breaking away from tradition. The attainment of technic, attended by the inevitable pride in technic, liberates its possessors. The spirit of the Italian religious painters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, content to submit their skill to further the educational purposes of the Church, could no longer persist in connection with the growing delight in new technical problems and the vision of the new fields open to art when face to face with reality. The conventional treatment of the Memmis and Fra Angelicos was followed by the naturalistic representation of the Raphaels, the Da Vincis, and the Titians. The same result has followed where pure art has decayed, or where no real appreciation of art ever existed. The stage of church art in its purest and most edifying form is, therefore, only temporary. It exists in the adolescent period of an art, before the achievement of technical skill arouses desire for its unhampered exercise, and when religious ideas are at the same time dominant and pervasive. Neither is doubt to be cast upon the sincerity of the religious motive in this phase of art growth when we discover that its technical methods are identical with those of secular art at the same period. In fact, this general and conventional style which the Church finds suited to her ends is most truly characteristic when the artists have virtually no choice in their methods. The motive of the Gothic cathedral builders was no less religious because their modes of construction and decoration were also common to the civic and domestic architecture of the time. A distinctive ecclesiastical style has never developed in rivalry with contemporary tendencies in secular art, but only in unison with them. The historic church styles are also secular styles, carried to the highest practicable degree of refinement and splendor. These styles persist in the Church after they have disappeared in the mutations of secular art; they become sanctified by time and by the awe which the claim of supernatural commission inspires, and the world at last comes to think of them as inherently rather than conventionally religious.