it for a long time--the
art of Byzantium.

BYZANTINE PAINTING: Constantinople was rebuilt and rechristened by
Constantine, a Christian emperor, in the year 328 A.D. It became a
stronghold of Christian traditions, manners, customs, art. But it was
not quite the same civilization as that of Rome and the West. It was
bordered on the south and east by oriental influences, and much of
Eastern thought, method, and glamour found its way into the Christian
community. The artists fought this influence, stickling a long time
for the severer classicism of ancient Greece. For when Rome fell the
traditions of the Old World centred around Constantinople. But classic
form was ever being encroached upon by oriental richness of material
and color. The struggle was a long but hopeless one. As in Italy,
form failed century by century. When, in the eighth century, the
Iconoclastic controversy cut away the little Greek existing in it, the
oriental ornament was about all that remained.

There was no chance for painting to rise under the prevailing
conditions. Free artistic creation was denied the artist. An advocate
of painting at the Second Nicene Council declared that: "It is not the
invention of the painter that creates the picture, but an inviolable
law of the Catholic Church. It is not the painter but the holy fathers
who have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly belongs the
composition, to the painter only the execution." Painting was in a
strait-jacket. It had to follow precedent and copy what had gone
before in old Byzantine patterns. Both in Italy and in Byzantium the
creative artist had passed away in favor of the skilled artisan--the
repeater of time-honored forms or colors. The workmanship was good for
the time, and the coloring and ornamental borders made a rich setting,
but the real life of art had gone. A long period of heavy, morose,
almost formless art, eloquent of mediaeval darkness and ignorance,
followed.

[Illustration: FIG. 21.--EZEKIEL BEFORE THE LORD. MS. ILLUMINATION.
PARIS, NINTH CENTURY.]

It is strange that such an art should be adopted by foreign nations,
and yet it was. Its bloody crucifixions and morbid madonnas were well
fitted to the dark view of life held during the Middle Ages, and its
influence was wide-spread and of long duration. It affected French and
German art, it ruled at the North, and in the East it lives even to
this day. That it strongly affected Italy is a very apparent fact.
Just wh