What else, then, could possibly have been expected from such an ideal than the ultimate decline and uglification of the body? To what else did such an ideal actually aspire? For was not ugliness the strongest obstacle in the way of the loving one, in the way of him who wished only to affirm and to promote life? When the student of mediæval miniatures, wall-paintings and stained-glass windows finds bodily charm almost completely eliminated, when he sees ugliness prevailing, and even made seductive by a host of the most subtle art-forms, by a gorgeous wealth of ornament and repetitive design; and when he perceives a certain guilty self-consciousness in regard to the attributes of sex revealing itself in such paintings as that on the ceiling of the Church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, where Adam and Eve are represented as naked human monstrosities, exactly alike in frame and limbs, and with all indications as to sex, save Eve's long tresses and Adam's beard, carefully suppressed,[18] what can be concluded from all this irrefutable and unimpeachable evidence? When he finds the Gothic type of figure growing ever more tenuous, ever more emaciated and more sickly as the centuries roll on; when he hears of a Byzantine canon of the eleventh century in which the human body is actually declared to be a monstrosity measuring nine heads; when he finds strength and manhood gradually departing from the faces and the limbs of the men, and an expression of tender sentiment, culminating in puling sentimentality becoming the rule; finally, when he stands opposite Segna's appalling picture of "Christ on the Cross" at the National Gallery; what, under these circumstances, is he to say, save that he is here concerned with an art which is antagonistic and hostile to beauty, to Life and the world? For the qualities of this art, qua art, although they never once attain to the excellence of Ruler-Art, are sometimes exceedingly great. With Meier Graefe I should be willing to agree that there has been no real style since the Gothic,[19] or certainly not one that can claim anything like such general distribution. And, if it had not been for the fact that the more the paradox at the root of Christian doctrine was realized, the more paradoxical it appeared--a fact which called forth the energies of scores of apologists, commentators, and dialecticians, and which made pictures retain to the very end a rhetorical, persuasive, and therefore more or less realistic manner, sometimes assisted (more especially towards the close of the Middle Ages) by almost lyrical ornament and charm; there is no saying to what simple power Christian art might not have attained. For behind it were all the conditions which go to produce the greatest artistic achievements.