[322b] Now however this may be, we must see here also the phenomenon of double symbolization^a which expresses itself ALSO in these tensions. When you come into a Roman church, with many side chapels, you see (at least in one of them, often in several of them) people kneeling and praying before pictures of the Holy Virgin, or some saint, pictures which are, aesthetically speaking, horrors, kitsch, or however you want to call it, which by some quality has become religiously powerful: they point, without artistic form, to the religious symbol and remind, instead of written letter, or stories told, by their pictural attempt, the people OF their religious symbols-^b--the Holy Virgin, or the saints, or the Christ in crucifixion or resurrection, or in any other of His life stories.

So here again you have the tension. And it is interesting that the great Renaissance pictures, the Raphaels^c and Bellinis^d and Pieros^e, etc., never became cult pictures, in the real sense of the word: they didn't produce piety because (for reasons to which I will immediately come; I will show some of them) they couldn't go beyond their aesthetic symbolism to the religious symbolism^f which is their subject matter. But this subject matter was swallowed by the artistic symbolism which belongs to the great artistic symbols^g, but in the situation of double symbolization^h, the second, namely

the religious, element got lost, while in the other, where we have the poorest horrors of art, the religious symbolization was preserved. Again I would say: the ideal is of course a perfect artistic symbolization which has preserved the religious power in the ritual context.