Whilst the Eastern Christian church was developing Byzantinism, the Western Christian church, after Charlemagne's death, proceeded to build upon its basilicas the domed roof, and to add the towers of what is called Romanesque architecture. The Romanesque in turn gave way to the Gothic. Now, the large wall spaces of the heavily built, round-arched, Romanesque churches did not call out for painting, since they were ill lit ; whilst the pointed-arched, high, widely fretted and fragile tracery of the Gothic architecture, nearly all windows and little wall space, did not leave room for wall paintings. Thus wall-painting, so intrinsic an art of early Christianity in the catacombs, fell away when Christianity came out of the earth and built her domed basilicas of the Romanesque period, and later her many-windowed fretted traceries of the Gothic years. But the Gothic windows had to be filled in with glass ; and this glass came to be beautifully coloured-creating the great Gothic art of glass-painting, the bright colouring of which had so profound an influence [22] upon the painting of the Renaissance. Side by side with this glass-painting went the exquisite illumination of manuscripts. The Gothic had also another, a vital, quality that raised it above the Romanesque-it rejected convention and went to nature for its sculpturing-so that you shall find recorded on Gothic architecture the fulness of life as the Middle Ages knew it ; the moods of the passing seasons, the life of the fields, or the life of the craftsman and of the buyers, and of the warrior and the like. The aim of Gothic art is not beauty nor pleasure, but to teach. It is true that the teaching of the Middle Ages was austere enough, concerned more with the harsh and greyer virtues of the fear of damnation rather than with the tender humanities, appealing to the reason rather than to the heart-an age in which the poet, such as Dante, brooded on hells and punishments, and saw life a sombre affair-an age when " opinions," except such as the Church approved, meant burning at the stake or the like hellishness.

But out of Gothic art was born the glorification of character-the great art of portraiture-in those recumbent effigies of the dead, lying carved in stone upon their tombs. The nude is almost wholly absent ; and, strange to say, whether in carving or aught else, Gothic art failed to create a Christ, even an infant Christ, of supreme achievement.

At last the Renaissance dawned over Italy and France and Flanders. Re-birth it truly was not, for Art never dies. But a new spirit was passing across the face of Europe. Life, and with it Art, was evolving, stepping to further fulfilment. And Humanism was lagely responsible for it. The Church had been teacher since Rome fell ; but she had become alarmed at her own teaching, and was harshly punishing all such teaching as she did not herself approve. [23] It was too late. Humanism, an inquisitive eagerness to dip into the history and arts and achievement of antiquity, above all, the grandeur of Greece, arose to bring a splendid discontent to men.

Just as the Greek fugitives, before the Homeric years, had fled to the south carrying their ancient arts with them, and these arts had returned again in after centuries to the barbarian conquerors of Greece, and created the Greek masters ; so in the thirteen-hundreds, at the ending of the Middle Ages called Dark, the descendants of the old Roman days of greatness, inspired by the Greeks, brought back to Italian soil the traditions of a pagan and heroic past, and planted the same in Florence and Rome, to the fertilising and blossoming and fruition of the Renaissance.

The state of the art of painting from the decline of Hellenic art in the years of Christ to the end of the Dark Ages, is perhaps best grasped by taking such portraits from mummy-cases as were discovered in Egypt by Professor Flinders Petrie, and now in the National Gallery in London, wherein we see the Græco-Roman portraiture of the first two or three hundred years after Christ, if not of the days of Christ-these are in the wax medium of ancient Greece known as " encaustic "-and then looking upon the painting of a Tuscan painter, working in the neighbourhood of Florence at the end of the Dark Ages a thousand years afterwards, when Christianity, come above ground from its hiding-places, had taken to itself much of the pagan thought and forms and had absorbed them, and had, for its decorative symbols, developed Byzantine formality into such splendour as the rigid forms and bright colouring of mosaic yielded. This glowing but stiff formalism of Byzantine decoration, whether in the " miniatures," as the illuminations of its elaborate documents are called, or in its richly [24] coloured, much be-gilt mosaics, was wholly given up to the service of the Church, which ever grew in power; and, as it so increased, the Church demanded increasing splendour to impose upon the mind of man ; and just as the religion of the Church set into a splendid formality and elaborate convention, so the Byzantine art set with it, and answered to it astounding well ; and exactly as the Church strangled all individual thought and action, so the Byzantine art, with its narrow scope, suited the Church which it adorned and expressed with rigorous narrowness and sumptuous splendour, uttered in formal schemes which strangled all individual statement and repeated set forms. Byzantium sent forth her painters throughout Italy and the wide Christian world, and set her vogue upon Italy. And we shall find in Tuscany, in the neighbourhood of Florence, at the end of the Dark Ages, on the edge of the dawn of the Renaissance, no better example of the Byzantine art than in such a painter as the Tuscan MARGARITONE d'Arezzo, or di Magnano, born about 1216, and dying in 1293, on the eve of the thirteen hundreds.

I
MARGARITONE
1216? - 1293
TUSCAN SCHOOL
"THE VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH SCENES FROM THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
In the centre is seated the Virgin holding before her on her lap the Christ, who blesses in the Greek manner. The Virgin is placed in a mandorla. On either side are :
1. The Nativity.
2. St. John the Evangelist liberated by Angels from the caldron of boiling oil.
3. The Martyrdom of St. Catherine and her Burial on Mount Sinai.
4. St. Nicholas exhorting the Sailors to throw overboard a vase of oil given to them by the Devil.
5. St. John raising Drusiana.
6. St. Benedict, haunted by the recollection of a beautiful woman he had seen in Rome, plunging himself into a thicket of briars and nettles to mortify the flesh.
7. St. Nicholas preventing the execution of three innocent men.
8. St. Margaret swallowed and disgorged again by the Dragon, unhurt.
The picture bears the signature, in Latin, of the artist : " Margaritone of Arezzo made me."
Painted in tempera on linen affixed to wood. 2 ft. 9 in. h. x 5 ft. 9 in. w. (0.839 x 1.753).