Yet as I go through these innumerable dark churches of Italy, these heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the sense of faded frescoes and worm-eaten pictures, and vaults and crypts, and mouldering frippery and mildewed relics, and saintly bones mocked by jewelled shroudings, and dim-burning oil-lamps—the blue sky of Italy shut out as in a pious perversity—and more, when I see the subjects of the paintings and gravings, these _Crucifixions_ and _Entombments_ and _Descents from the Cross_, varied by the mimetic martyrdoms of the first believers, it is borne in on me depressingly how the secret of Jesus has been darkened, and a doctrine of life—“Walk while ye have the light . . . that ye may be the children of light”—has been turned to a doctrine of death. St. Sebastian with his arrows, St. Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no doubt, sublime spectacles; but had not the martyr’s life been noble, and had he not died for the right to live it, his death would have been merely ignominious. The death of Socrates owes its value to the life of Socrates. Many a murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble experimenters with Röntgen rays, or the explorers who perish in polar wastes, recording with freezing fingers the latitude of their death.
Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration on the Passion, with its strong lights and shadows. Indeed, the artistic strength of the mere story is so tremendous that it has wiped out the message of the Master and thrown Christianity quite out of perspective. Tintoretto’s frescoes in San Rocco—indeed, most sacred pictures—are like a picture-book for the primitive. (_Picturæ sunt idiotarum libri._) The anecdotal Christ alone survives. And the painters were the journalists, the diffusers and interpreters of ideas.
The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of romance and the pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with unction the fine wood and the decorative nails of the Cross; even the winding-sheet is treated by Giulio Clovio for its decorative value. Where in all these galleries and legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the parables and the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet of righteousness, the lover of little children? The living Christ was overcast by the livid light of the tomb. He was buried in the Latin of the Church, while every chapel and cloister taught in glaring colour the superficial dramatic elements, and Calvaries were built to accentuate it, and men fought for the Cross and swore by the Holy Rood, and collected the sacred nails and fragments of the wood and thorns of the crown.