300 THE WORLD AS IDEA. bk. iii.
scenes (as in French tragedies), it is clearly a far greater fault in a picture. Historical subjects are distinctly disadvantageous only when they confine the painter to a field which has not been chosen for artistic but for other reasons, and especially when this field is poor in picturesque and significant objects — if, for example, it is the history of a small, isolated, capricious, hierarchical (i.e., ruled by error), obscure people, like the Jews, despised by the great contemporary nations of the East and the West. Since the wandering of the tribes lies between us and all ancient nations, as the change of the bed of the ocean lies between the earth's surface as it is to-day and as it was when those organisations existed which we only know from fossil remains, it is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune that the people whose culture was to be the principal basis of our own were not the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but these very Jews. But it was especially a great misfortune for the Italian painters of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that, in the narrow sphere to which they were arbitrarily driven for the choice of subjects, they were obliged to have recourse to miserable beings of every kind. For the New Testament, as regards its historical part, is almost more unsuitable for painting than the Old, and the subsequent history of martyrs and doctors of the church is a very unfortunate subject. Yet of the pictures, whose subject is the history or mythology of Judaism and Christianity, we must carefully distinguish those in which the peculiar, i.e., the ethical spirit of Christianity is revealed for perception, by the representation of men who are full of this spirit. These representations are in fact the highest and most admirable achievements of the art of painting; and only the greatest masters of this art succeeded in this, particularly Raphael and Correggio, and especially in their earlier pictures. Pictures of this kind are not properly to be classed as historical : for, as a rule, they represent no event, no action; but are merely groups of
