86 RENAISSANCES

Hanxlin in Constantinople bore fruit in a Western World that was

Brunei's as well as Hamlin's homeland.

This sterilization of the West's artistic genius, which was the nemesis
of a Hellenizing renaissance in the realm of Architecture, was no less
conspicuous in the realms of Painting and Sculpture. Over a spun of more
than half a millennium running from the generation of Dante's con-
temporary Giotto (decessit A.D. 1337), a Modern Western school of Paint-
ing, which had unquestioningly accepted the naturalistic ideals of an
Hellenic visual art in its post-archaic phase, had worked out, one after
another, divers methods of conveying the visual impressions made by
light and shade until this long-sustained effort to produce the effects
of photography through prodigies of artistic technique had been stulti-
fied, on the eve of its consummation, by the invention of photography
itself. After the ground had thus inconsiderately been cut away from
under their feet by the shears of Modern Western Science, Modern
Western painters made a Tre-Raphaelite' Movement,1 in the direction of
their long since repudiated Byzantine provenance, before they thought
of exploring a new world of Psychology which Science had given them
to conquer in compensation for the old world of Physical Nature which
she had stolen from the painter in order to hand it over to the photo-
grapher. After the invention of photography the best part of u century
had to pass before the rise of an apocalyptic school of Western painters
who made a genuinely new departure by frankly using paint —veritably
•more Byzantino—to convey the spiritual experiences of Psyche instead
of the visual impressions of Argus ;2 but the increasing surcneas of foot
with which the Western painters were advancing along this new road by
the close of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to augur that
the Western sculptors, in their turn, would cventuully act their faces
in the same direction after discovering, by trial and error, that the
broken road to Athens, which they had been following ever since a
Niccol6 Pisano had swerved into it in the thirteenth century, could
not, after all, be regained by a detour through either Byzantium or
Benin.

t Thus, at the time of writing, it looked as if, in all three visual arts, the
sterilization of a native Western genius by an exotic Hellenmng renuia-
sance'might eventually be overcome; but the slowness and the difficulty
of the cure showed how serious the damage had been,

(/) RENAISSANCES OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS

In the Realm of Religion the classical example of a renaissance was
Judaism's perennial trick of springing up, like an accusatory juek-m-the-
box, out of Christianity's Ark of a New Covenant,

The relation of Christianity to Judaism was as damningly clear to
Jewish eyes as it was embarrassingly ambiguous for Christian con-
sciences. In Jewish eyes the Christian Church was a renegade Jewish
sect which, on the evidence of its own unauthorized appendix to the

i See V. vL 60.

» In IV. iv. 52, this positive aim of a revolutionary twentieth-century ichool of
Western painting has not been given due recognition.