throngs about their dying Creator, wringing their hands in helpless grief, offering him their lowliest worship, or catching in chalices the sacred blood. At the foot of the Cross, also, is sometimes found a crowd of figures, representing not the hostile multitude that surged with blasphemous taunts before the failing eyes of Christ; but monks, bishops, virgins, kings, the saintly and devout of later ages, who stand in wrapt attention or kneel in homage. In those days, when every art found its highest expression in the service of the Church, every encouragement was given to the painting of sacred subjects; and the artists, loyal sons for the most part of the Church, sought their highest ambition in realizing their ideal of a Crucifixion, a picta, or a madonna. To these feelings we owe the splendid frescoes of Cimabue, and of Giotto, the friend of Dante, at Assissi, the paintings of Duccio, the first, it is said, to represent our Lord on His Cross with the feet laid one upon the other; and above all the wonderful works of Fra Angelico, who embodied, if ever man did, his whole faith in his pictures, with reverent devotion and tenderest purity. But it would be wandering beyond the limits, both of our subject and of our space, to examine in any detail those sacred canvases and frescoes by which the artists of the Italian Renaissance have placed the whole world under a debt, which never can be paid. The very names of Florence and Siena, of Umbria and Venice, of Verona, Ferrara, and Milan, seem redolent of sacred art. Suffice it to say, in conclusion, that gradually as the fifteenth century advanced, and especially in the age that followed, the symbolic and devotional treatment of the tremendous spectacle of the Crucifixion was eclipsed by the realistic and historic method. The painter no longer approached his subject with awe, that compelled a reserve eloquent of faith in its great mystery; but too often he sought in frenzied crowds, impassioned Magdalens, and contorted limbs to display his own skill only. For Crucifixions that raise the thoughts and heart from the canvas to Calvary itself, we must turn back to those ages, which, with less anatomical knowledge, and perhaps less technical skill, were nevertheless inspired with more perfect ideals and nobler art from the mere fulness of a simple and sincere faith. CHAPTER III. The Cross in Ritual.