Ruskin, with a vision large enough to retain all that was eternally precious in the past, began by recognizing the elements of real vitality even in the outworn classicism which was the occasion of his readers’ revolt; and led them thence to the higher places of refreshment and advance. “We must be careful,” said he, “not to lose sight of the real use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that for a model of perfection which is, in many cases, only a guide to it. The young artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength from all advance, and bend his eyes backward on a beaten path; who would thrust canvas between him and the sky, and tradition between him and God.” Again, Ruskin insisted continually upon the essential and supreme moral purpose of art as a “criticism of life”—as a later authority has called it. He made clear the relation between _thought_ and _language_ in painting, wherein lies for ever the crux of art; and pointed to examples of the contrast and the conflict between those two principles whereof the right adjustment is art’s final aim. “Most pictures,” said Ruskin, “of the Dutch school, for instance, excepting always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless words; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to distinguish what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, nor weighed against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever. The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.” Thus the author of “Modern Painters” did for his readers what was more helpful than all precept,—he showed them the high paths trodden aforetime by men of like aspirations after a similar revolt. He led them back to an age which had seen the same struggle between the old art and the new; an age in which the difficulty of presenting human life and its environment in faithful colours and in natural images had already been met, and in some measure overcome. That age was the mother of modern art in Europe. The fourteenth century, waking from mediævalism, felt the first quickenings of the Renaissance in Italy.