Take painting again. There is no such thing as “_the_” art of Painting, and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade, without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus, and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral- window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon? If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-form—they are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.[274] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is _nothing_ in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli or a façade of Michelangelo. _Inwardly_, the Quattrocento is related to the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early Tuscan representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely what is implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme—he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art—Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is _once existent_, and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to return. II