The dark chapel of the Rucellai, in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, has a dingy altar-piece representing the Virgin and the infant Christ. Cimabue painted it; and when it was finished the Florentines made a holiday, and bore the picture through the streets, amid great rejoicing, to the chapel where it now hangs. That stiff and awkward Madonna, that doll-like Child, were hailed by them as the highest achievement of painting. For us Cimabue’s masterpiece has only an historic interest,--we find no charm in its Byzantine rigidness. Yet that crude work was the seed of Italian painting, and if we follow its growth during three centuries we shall be led to the “Paradise” of Tintoret, in which are embodied all the excellences and advances of the painter’s art. Between that humble beginning and that glorious culmination an army of artists and myriads of paintings intervene. If we look deep enough, we shall be conscious that they were all agents whereby a mighty spirit was seeking to express itself to man,--a spirit which first appealed to human piety through the symbols of religion, and which, as its agents acquired skill and reach, bodied itself forth in higher images and in conscious forms. The name of that spirit is Beauty, never to be found perfect in the outer world, but known as it communicates through the senses portents of itself which the soul sublimes into that ideal unity by which the laws of nature and the destiny of man are beheld in their highest aspect. True Worship, as in the sweet piety of Fra Angelico, led to Beauty; to Beauty also, along an inevitable path, led the pursuit of Truth by the sixteenth century masters, latest among whom was Tintoret: for Beauty is the final seal and test of both Holiness and Truth. GIORDANO BRUNO: HIS TRIAL, OPINIONS, AND DEATH[27] [27] First printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1890. I