Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest,
native in the human soul, reasserted its claims. But Christian art was
still dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples
into its churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later times
working the disused amphitheatres as quarries. The sensuous expression of
conceptions which unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the
delicate problem which Christian art had before it. If we think of
medieval painting, as it ranges from the early German schools, still with
something of the air of the charnel-house about them, to the clear
loveliness of Perugino, we shall see how that problem was solved. Even in
the worship of sorrow the native blitheness of art asserted itself; the
religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled through its tears." So perfectly
did the young Raffaelle infuse that Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness,
into religious works, that his picture of Saint Agatha at Bologna became
to Goethe a step in the evolution of Iphigenie.
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