I have made between old and ancient may be better
understood I will explain that I call ancient the things produced
before Constantine at Corinth, Athens, Rome and other renowned
cities, until the days of Nero, Vaspasian, Trajan, Hadrian and
Antoninus; the old works are those which are due to the surviving
Greeks from the days of St Silvester, whose art consisted rather of
tinting than of painting. For the original artists of excellence had
perished in the wars, as I have said, and the surviving Greeks, of
the old and not the ancient manner, could only trace profiles on a
ground of colour. Countless mosaics done by these Greeks in every
part of Italy bear testimony to this, and every old church of Italy
possesses examples, notably the Duomo of Pisa, S. Marco at Venice
and yet other places. Thus they produced a constant stream of
figures in this style, with frightened eyes, outstretched hands and
on the tips of their toes, as in S. Miniato outside Florence between
the door of the sacristy and that of the convent, and in S. Spirito
in the same city, all the side of the cloister towards the church,
and in Arezzo in S. Giuliano and S. Bartolommeo and other churches,
and at Rome in old S. Peter's in the scenes about the windows, all of
which are more like monsters than the figures which they are supposed
to represent. They also produced countless sculptures, such as those
in bas-relief still over the door of S. Michele on the piazza Padella
at Florence, and in Ognissanti, and in many places, in tombs and
ornaments for the doors of churches, where there are some figures
acting as corbels to carry the roof, so rude and coarse, so grossly
made, and in such a rough style, that it is impossible to imagine
worse.

Up to the present, I have discoursed exclusively upon the origin of
sculpture and painting, perhaps more at length than was necessary at
this stage. I have done so, not so much because I have been carried
away by my love for the arts, as because I wish to be of service to
the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning
leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it
is possible to fall to utterest ruin, and consequently, how the
nature of these arts resembles nature in other things which concern
our human bodies; there is birth, growth, age, death, and I hope by
this means they will be enabled more easily to recognise the progress
of the renaissance of the arts, and the perfection