Religious art was the only public art known in the Middle Ages. If material political interests swayed the minds of communities in Pagan times, when the nations became Christian the supersensual, _i.e._, the salvation of the soul, became the great concern of the individual as of the community. Patriotism disappeared from the domain of emotion; what took its place—the pride of town, or class, or guild—was merely delight in material possession, or, if you like, a sort of vulgar dignity without any ideal background. Faith was their only sentiment, piety the artist’s sole impulse from which genuine creations could spring. It followed, therefore, that religious art—the only monumental art then in existence—attached itself to sacred places, and subordinated itself to them as really mere accessory decoration. Without resting on architecture, sculpture stood on its own feet only in the Stations of the Cross on Calvaries, but, even in this case, it had no object of its own, but served a definite purpose of worship. The beginnings of a public art which grew out of an abstract thought of the community—one not of a religious but of a temporal, of civic nature—are scanty and dim. As forerunners of such an art we can claim the Roland Pillars of the Free Towns—the symbol of their civil and criminal jurisdiction—with their indistinct, historical background of dim memories of Charlemagne as the legal source of municipal liberties, and perhaps also the Byzantine Lion of Brunswick. The Renaissance was the first to create a monumental art that was to serve no practical, religious, or dynastic purpose, but one purely æsthetic, from which people looked for no strengthening of ecclesiastical views, no increase of authority and, through that, of power in a prince or government, but looked, in fact, only for delight in beauty. Renaissance art, I admit, rich and free as its development was, also remained thoroughly under the influence of mediæval traditions, and knew no other range of themes than those derived from the Bible and Classic mythology. Even worldlings among the artists, who had outgrown religious ideas, drew at least their stories from the New and, even more commonly, from the Old Testament, or from pagan mythology, which was familiar only to the educated, and to the multitude at large was meaningless, and devoid of life. A scholastic pedantry hung about such works as Benvenuto Cellini’s “Perseus,” for instance, which prevented the masses from appreciating them fully. It was not, however, done from haughty disdain, for monumental art—the art of the streets and squares—appeals indeed to the masses. The modelling, on the one hand, of what is purely human, which appeals to feelings in every human heart, and is, therefore, understood by every man; on the other hand, of a subject, well-defined in time and place, which must be familiar, at any rate, to contemporaries and residents: this degree sculpture attained only gradually and late.