once as the Omnipotent Wisdom, the Word by whom all things
were made, and once as God deigning to assume a shape of flesh and
dwell with men. The magnificent image of supreme Deity seems to fill
with a single influence and to dominate the whole building. The
house with all its glory is His. He dwells there like Pallas in her
Parthenon or Zeus in his Olympian temple. To left and right over
every square inch of the cathedral blaze mosaics, which portray the
story of God's dealings with the human race from the Creation
downwards, together with those angelic beings and saints who
symbolise each in his own degree some special virtue granted to
mankind. The walls of the fane are therefore an open book of
history, theology, and ethics for all men to read.

[1] Matteo of Ajello induced William to found an
archbishopric at Monreale in order to spite his rival
Offamilio.

The superiority of mosaics over fresco as an architectural adjunct
on this gigantic scale is apparent at a glance in Monreale.
Permanency of splendour and glowing richness of tone are all on the
side of the mosaics. Their true rival is painted glass. The jewelled
churches of the south are constructed for the display of coloured
surfaces illuminated by sunlight falling on them from narrow
windows, just as those of the north--Rheims, for example, or Le
Mans--are built for the transmission of light through a variegated
medium of transparent hues. The painted windows of a northern
cathedral find their proper counterpart in the mosaics of the south.
The Gothic architect strove to obtain the greatest amount of
translucent surface. The Byzantine builder directed his attention to
securing just enough light for the illumination of his glistening
walls. The radiance of the northern church was similar to that of
flowers or sunset clouds or jewels. The glory of the southern temple
was that of dusky gold and gorgeous needlework. The north needed
acute brilliancy as a contrast to external greyness. The south found
rest from the glare and glow of noonday in these sombre splendours.
Thus Christianity, both of the south and of the north, decked her
shrines with colour. Not so the Paganism of Hellas. With the Greeks,
colour, though used in architecture, was severely subordinated to
sculpture; toned and modified to a calculated harmony with actual
nature, it did not, as in a Christian church, create a world beyond
the world, a paradise of supersensual ecstasy, but r