[17] The masterpieces of the great Greek painters are but a legend. But the Romans, as they made their conquests in Greece, brought back a taste for Greek works of art, and were early attracting Greek artists to Rome. The empire increased the collecting of Greek works. In Pompeii and Herculaneum, two seaside pleasure resorts, overwhelmed by Vesuvius in the year 79 after Christ, have been found a goodly number of wall-paintings which, allowing for the second-rate taste that would prevail in a pleasure-resort not too famous for the nobility of its high living or aims, prove a wide and remarkable activity in painting. And from Egypt have come the famous portraits in encaustic painting from the first centuries of the Roman Empire, and known as the encaustic portraits of the Græco-Roman period, which show high artistry.

Now, it is well to note that whilst Rome took much from the tradition of ancient Greece, she also had latent artistic gifts which were created partly out of the Italian soil, and partly out of the Eastern Mediterranean whence she largely came. She built temples, baths, triumphal arches, columns, and the like, which had no outside influence. The " arenas " or circuses, such as the Coliseum, were new. She employed the dome and the arch, of which Greece knew nothing-but which came to Rome out of Assyria and the East, and thereby produced Romanesque architecture, and thereby partly produced Byzantine. Her sculpture never reached to Greek heights ; but her architecture took on the vastness of Eastern ambitions ; and the sculpture of the Empire at least put forth strength in character and thereby produced fine portraiture. In painting there was latent genius, and some of the paintings at Pompeii show an astounding affinity to the French work of the seventeen hundreds ; whilst, in the catacombs, Christian art had its beginnings.

[18] Throughout the Middle Ages, the innate Italian impetus towards Realism in painting struggled hard to evolve itself against the Byzantine-Greek spirit that ever threatened from the East ; but it was not until the close of the Middle Ages, in the thirteen hundreds, that at last Italian Realism shook off the Eastern pattern of Byzantine, crept out over the land, and, fired by the Gothic realism of France, dawned in the Renaissance.

To get a thorough grip upon the fact of the Renaissance, it is well to understand exactly what is meant by Byzantine. The early Christian paintings were made by a persecuted people who, to practise their religion, had to meet together in the underground tunnels, called catacombs, of Rome, where they also buried their dead. These catacombs were the church and burial-place of the early Christians from about one hundred years to about four hundred years after Christ.

When Christianity came above ground and became the religion of the State, burial and worship also came to the surface.

Now the chief craft employed in the catacombs was painting ; thus Christianity was destined to produce a great achievement in painting from its very beginnings. Sculpture in the round was repugnant to the early Christians, as being the craft employed in making the gods of their pagan masters, and thereby associated with the worship of idols ; and even in painting, the same intention created a repugnance to representing their own God-indeed, even the crucified Christ only began to be treated in the art of the catacombs towards the very end. Symbols arose, such as the peacock for eternity ; but, except that painting shrank from the nude, and created certain symbols and [19] motives in the spirit of its own revelation, the painters all along employed pagan imagery and forms, and you shall find in their design the Orpheus, Cupids, the Medusa head, and the like paganisms, just as the state Christianity later took from paganism its pagan altars and symbols, such as the lights ; whilst the style and treatment are akin to the wall-paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Byzantium (Constantinople) became the capital of Eastern Christendom in 330 after Christ. The Roman Court went to Ravenna, on the east side of Italy, in 404. About 500 Theodoric, the king of the Goths, settled his residence thereat, and from some thirty to forty years thereafter, for more than two centuries. Ravenna belonged to Byzantium-thus the spirit of Byzantium (Constantinople) hung upon the edge of Italy.

Now, when Christianity arose from its underground life in the catacombs, and came to the surface, it built for itself, or took possession of, the large marts or places of assembly, a long rectangular hall, flat-roofed, often with side aisles, and called a basilica--just as to-day it might take for use the town-hall ; for the Christian church was a place of assembly for worship, differing vastly therein from the pagan temple, which was the place of residence of the god.

To this square, flat-roofed Italian basilica, the Eastern spirit of the Christian church at Byzantium brought the domed roofing of the East ; of which the world-famed church of St. Sophia in Constantinople is the great example-built in the mid five hundreds by Asiatic architects, and for long the cathedral of the Eastern Christians, until Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, when in Italy the Renaissance was in its full flowering. Now, we have already seen the Romans of the Empire employing the dome, as in the Pantheon. But the Byzantine art held [20] the love of sumptuous splendour of colouring, brought from the East ; and concerned itself with gorgeous colouring and much use of gold and gilding-its whole spirit was Asiatic and luxurious, and shows its design in the oriental carpet, far removed from the severe achievement of Greek and Roman art-it abhors the human figure, and concerns itself with geometrical and conventional pattern. This orientalised art of the Eastern Christianity of Byzantium was further accentuated by the fanatical movement of the ascetic Iconoclasts (Image-Breakers) in the seven and eight hundreds, when, throughout the Eastern world of Christianity, vast numbers of works of art were destroyed as tending towards idolatry. The sculptors and artists fled west, and many reached the court of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. On the overthrow of the Iconoclasts about 850, the arts had a mighty renaissance in the Byzantine Empire, lasting throughout the nine hundreds and much of the ten hundreds, until about the years that William the Conqueror came to rule over us in the West. This great Byzantine achievement, in arms and general prosperity and intellect, saw much painting on parchment and enamelling, besides superb goldsmith's work ; but its chief glory was in the mosaic. Yet its theatricality, its poverty of means to utter art, and its rigid and hidebound limits, could not be wholly hidden under its love of sumptuous splendour of colouring ; and it early became petrified even in its majestic intention. Then the Arab invasion swept across the sea out of Asia, overthrowing the Eastern Christianity, but stealing much of its art, and creating the elaborate patterns that are called arabesques. To Russia the Byzantine art fled, and lives to this day in her church and religion. To Southern Italy also Byzantium was long dictator; she dominated Ravenna in Eastern Italy, and her vast wealth, her wide-ranging [21] commerce, and her sumptuous splendour appealed to Venice, which built in 1100 her famous Byzantine Church of St. Mark's ; and even the artistry of mediæval Europe was tinged with the Byzantine spirit. The pomp and splendour of the Byzantine, hiding its emptiness of high emotion and a noble feeling under a gorgeous formality, threatened to fall on Italy, standing ghoul-like, a nightmare ever looming upon her Eastern frontiers, to be dissolved and banished at last by the innate love of truth and reality latent in the soil of Italy, that found its mouthpiece at last in Duccio and Giotto, who found a new revelation in art, seeing life with fresh eyes, and seeking skill of hand to state what they saw, thereby bringing the mighty re-birth of the Renaissance into the land.