followed it, however much in other aspects of artistic perfection they made a step forwards, yet for all that never secured again the perfection of these previous excellencies, when once it had been lost. (_γγ_) A _third_ aspect attaches to the further development of the art, in addition to those already discussed, which may be described as the wider embrace of it relatively to the subjects accepted for presentation by the new impulse. Just as what was regarded as sacred had from the very commencement of Italian painting approached more closely to reality by reason of the fact that men whose lives fell about the time of the painters themselves were declared to be saints, so too Art received into its own sphere other aspects of reality and present life. Starting from that earliest phase of pure spirituality and piety, an art whose aim was wholly absorbed in the expression of such religious emotions, painting proceeded more and more to associate the external life of the world with its religious subject-matter. The gladsome, forceful self-reliance of the citizen in the midst of his professional career, the business and the craft that was bound up with such qualities, the freedom, the manly courage and patriotism, in one word, his weal in the vital activities of the Present, all this newly-awakened sense of human delight in the virtues of civil life and its cheer and humour[360], this harmonized sympathy with what was actual in both its aspects of ideal life[361] and the external framework of the same, all this it was which entered now into his artistic conceptions and modes of presenting such and was made valid therein. It is in this spirit that the enthusiasm for landscape backgrounds, views of cities, environment of church buildings and palaces becomes a real instinct of artistic life; the living portraits of famous savants, friends, statesmen, artists, and other persons remarkable in their day for their wit and vivacity find a place in religious compositions; traits borrowed from both civil and domestic life are utilized with a greater or less degree of freedom and dexterity; and if, no doubt, the spiritual aspect of the religious content remained the foundation of all, yet the expression of piety was no longer exclusively isolate, but is linked together with the more ample life of reality and the open stage of the world[362]. No doubt we must add that by reason of this tendency the expression of religious concentration and its intimate piety is weakened, but art required also this worldly element in order to arrive at its culminating point.