Gothic, they had at first the appearance of something profane and worldly. The change of dogma that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit. We have seen how just at this time, when the _Faustian_ (German-Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new religion in the old garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed the whole meaning of painting. The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art. The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the _dynamic_ infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and, simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa, Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East. X The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a space- forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the _visible brush- stroke_. The Florentine masters had never at any time challenged the fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic employ—of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence, their pictures have a certain air of _being_, something felt, unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent _motion_-quality of the Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps. The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the _historical_ feeling comes out. Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that _has become_ but something that _is becoming_. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes— first met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a history and does not disguise it; and a