On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love.

Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless.

The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought.

Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions.

The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs--pictures in bronze or marble.[73] In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic statues, destined to take their places--not in churches, but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open squares of cities.