What, then, constitutes the ideal centre and main content of the religious field is, as we have already indicated in our examination of the romantic type of art, the essentially _reconciled_ and satisfied Love, whose object should appear in the art of painting, whose function it is to exhibit the most spiritual content under the mode of human and corporeal actuality, as no mere "beyond" of Spirit, but in its veritable presence. In conformity with such a result we may adduce the Holy Family, and above all the love of the Madonna to her child as the ideal content pre-eminently fitted to this sphere. On either side of this centre, however, a mass of additional material extends which is in varying degree less adapted in this sense to the art in question. I will now attempt to differentiate the whole of this material on the following lines.
(_αα_) The first objectification is the object of Love itself in its pure universality and unimpaired unity with itself--God Himself in His unphenomenal essence--or God the Father. In this case, however, painting has great difficulties to overcome, when it attempts to depict God the Father as the religious imagination of Christendom seeks to grasp Him. The Father of gods and men regarded as a particular personality is exhaustively dealt with by art in Zeus. What on the contrary falls away from the Christian conception of God the Father is the human individuality, in which painting is alone in a position to reproduce the spiritual aspect. For taken in His independent self-exclusion God the Father is no doubt spiritual personality and supreme Power, Wisdom and so forth, but only retained as such without defined form and as an abstraction of thought. The art of painting is, however, unable to avoid anthropomorphization, and must perforce assign to Him the figure of man. However broad in its generalization, however lofty, ideal, and masterful the presentment of such a figure may be, we fail to get beyond the fact that it is entirely a human individual of more or less grave aspect, which fails entirely to coalesce with the conception of God the Father. Among the early Flemish painters Van Eyck in his God the Father of the altar picture at Ghent has attained the greatest success that we can conceive as possible in this sphere. It is a creation that may well match our conception of the Olympian Zeus. But however consummate it may be also in its expression of eternal repose, loftiness, power, worth, and other qualities--and it is quite impossible to overstate the depth and imposing character of its conception no less than its execution--yet our imagination cannot fail to find something in it which does not satisfy. For what is here set before us as God the Father, that is to say a creation that is likewise human personality, is just what we first meet with in Christ the Son. It is in Him that we contemplate for the first time this decisive moment in which individuality and human existence combine as a moment in the Divine Life[254], and moreover combine in such a way that the same is not disclosed as an ingenious creature of the phantasy, as was the case with the Greek divinities, but as essential and very revelation, the fact of all importance and fundamental significance.