FLORENTINE SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING. 351 



My task, to-day, is to set before you some part of the design 

 of the first Master of the works in the Sistine Chapel ; and 1 

 believe that, from his teaching, you will, even in the hour 

 which I ask you now to give, learn what may be of true use 

 to you in all your future labour, whether in Oxford or else- 

 where. 



3. You have doubtless, in the course of these lectures, been 

 occasionally surprised by my speaking of Holbein and Sandro 

 Botticelli, as Reformers, in the same tone of respect, and with 

 the same implied assertion of their intellectual power and 

 agency, with which it is usual to speak of Luther and Savon- 

 arola. You have been accustomed, indeed, to hear painting 

 and sculpture spoken of as supporting or enforcing Church 

 doctrine ; but never as reforming or chastising it. Whether 

 Protestant or Roman Catholic, you have admitted what in the 

 one case you held to be the abuse of painting, in the further- 

 ance of idolatry in the other, its amiable and exalting min- 

 istry to the feebleness of faith. But neither have recognized, 

 the Protestant his ally, or the Catholic his enemy, in the 

 far more earnest work of the great painters of the fifteenth 

 century. The Protestant was, in most cases, too vulgar to 

 understand the aid offered to him by painting ; and in all 

 cases too terrified to believe in it. He drove the gift-bringing 

 Greek with imprecations from his sectarian fortress, or re- 

 ceived him within it only on the condition that he should 

 speak no word of religion there. 



4. On the other hand, the Catholic, in most cases too in- 

 dolent to read, and, in all, too proud to dread, the rebuke of 

 the reforming painters, confused them with the crowd of 

 his old flatterers, and little noticed their altered language, or 

 their graver brow. In a little while, finding they had ceased 

 to be amusing, he effaced their works, not as dangerous, but 

 as dull ; and recognized only thenceforward, as art, the innoc- 

 uous bombast of Michael Angelo, and fluent efflorescence of 

 Bernini. But when you become more intimately and impar- 

 tially acquainted with the history of the Reformation, you 

 will find that, as surely and earnestly as Memling and Giotto 

 ptrove in the north and south to set forth and exalt the Cath- 



