The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to _paint_. Its (quite unconscious) ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.] to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with graces and set upon the background of a _basso continuo_), paints heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in lines of melody (in Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no further. Music becomes itself _absolute_: it is music that (quite unconsciously again) dominates both painting and architecture in the 18th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world. What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it was after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more definitely, what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian as two entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the _organism_ of these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of “eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an _ornamentation_ of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To criticize their “stiffness” from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to miss the point entirely.