At the Renaissance, when art had a fuller life and wider aims, it was not sufficient to thus merely label the persons represented. The traditions of Byzantine art once broken, the painter was free to set upon the panel all the beauty that his mind could conceive and that his hand could execute. He had no longer to paint a Christ or a Madonna correct to a formula, but none the less he was bound to depict figures which should be instantly recognizable as God incarnate and the meek Mother of Christ. So from his freedom sprang the problem which has occupied the religious painter ever since, the painting of a soul’s quality, the making visible to the world of the beauty of holiness. During the great century of art, achievement came. Raphael, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Perugino required and used no symbol to express the majesty of Christ or the purity of the Virgin Mother. They had that power to make visible the intangible which, in art, is genius. But among the earlier artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, he who was unable to show by the announcing angel’s attitude and mien that his message was one of peace and goodwill, placed a branch of olive in his hand, and he who despaired of adequately depicting the immaculate purity of the Virgin, emphasized his point by setting a pot of spotless lilies by her side. So was the intention of the least-accomplished of artists made clear, even to the unlettered. After the first effervescence of the Renaissance had died down, the laws of sacred art became once more fixed, though never again (except in Spain beneath the Inquisition) with the strictness of the Byzantine school. Art as a teacher of religion required to be as conservative as the Catholic Church with which it was allied, and the symbolism of the fourteenth century has remained with few additions or modifications to our own day. When devotional pictures multiplied, emblems passed into what may be termed the heraldry of the Church. Though also used in decoration, their primary use upon altar vessels and Church furniture was to distinguish the object as sacred, or as the property of the Church, in the same way as the royal arms or a private crest indicated the ownership of secular things. They appeared on the banners used in processions of the Church and on the badges and insignia of religious orders, but were very seldom used in pictorial art. Indeed, it is in the early Flemish school alone that pictures similar to the van Eycks’ ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’[2] or to their ‘Fountain of Life’[3] are found, where angels, prophets, saints and patriarchs bow down before the emblem, not the figure, of the Saviour.