But in making good the promise they had given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand to enter a region not wholly their own--the region of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a world of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was materialised to the injury of its own essential quality.

Spirit, indeed, spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned; but flesh spake also to flesh in the aesthetic form.

The incarnation promised by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness.

Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the cost of making men believe that earth itself was heavenly.
At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into two main questions.

The first concerns the form of figurative art specially adapted to the requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth century.