* * * 238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through the gallery of the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind. The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol. The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for he is without his head;--wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his raiment;--and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring. 239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position, they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy Christ's head was when He bowed it;--but how heavy His body was when people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on, until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St. Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people, became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore, little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.