heresies, and thus became a part of the
history of the Church. The links are many between them and the history
of the State; and here ecclesiastical embroideries come in as
landmarks.

Royal and princely garments, which had served for state occasions,
were constantly dedicated as votive offerings, and converted into
vestments for the officiating priest, and so were recorded and
preserved.[481]

Royal and noble ladies employed their leisure hours in work for the
adornment of the Minster or the home church or chapel. Gifts of the
best were exchanged between convents, or forwarded to the holy father
at Rome, and were often enriched with jewels. The images of the Virgin
and saints received from wealthy penitents many costly garments,[482]
besides money and lands.

This dedicatory needlework has preserved to us the records of
classical, Byzantine, and Arab-Gothic design, which otherwise must
have been lost.

The Church records and illuminated MSS. give us most trustworthy
information of the way in which the altars, the priests, and even the
kings were arrayed; and the catalogues of royal wardrobes are also
very instructive, as we find how often princely gauds became, as gifts
to the Church, commemorative of historical events, such as a victory
or an accession, a marriage or a coronation.

Woltmann and Woermann say that the efforts of the Christians in the
time of Constantine tended to delay the extinction of classical design
in Rome. Of the fourth century they give as examples the mosaics of
"S^ta. Pudenziana," where we can still find antique beauty of
design. We may also mention the church of "St. Agnese fuori le mura,"
which once contained the sarcophagi of Constantine and his mother
Helena, and of which the decorations in the ceilings are entirely
classical, though the motives had been transferred to Christian
symbolism.[483]

The total disappearance of Greek art did not occur till the eighth
century, when the new blood infused from foreign sources began to
assert itself.[484]

Rome had succeeded to Greece as being the centre of Christian art,
which assumed the phase commonly called the Romanesque. This was a
conglomerate of Oriental, Byzantine, and Graeco-Roman, varied in
different countries. Then there were the Scandinavian, and Runic, and
Celtic styles drifting from the North; the Lombardic, of Central
Italy; the Ostro-Gothic, of Ravenna; the Byzantine, of Venice, all
acting and reacting upon each other.