frieze of
angels blowing trumpets stand on the celestial sea on either hand of the
Enthroned Majesty.

Such mosaics flowed out widely over the Christian world trom its art
centres, as far east as Sana, the capital of Yemen, as far north as Kiev in
Russia, and Aachen in Germany, and as far west as Paris, and continued in
time for a thousand years without break in the tradition save by the
iconoclastic dispute. The finest late example is the well-known
"mosaic-church" (the Convent of the Saviour) at Constantinople, a work of
the 14th century.

The single figures were from the first, and for the most part, treated with
an axial symmetry. Almost all are full front; only occasionally will one,
like the announcing angel, be drawn with a three-quarter face. The features
are thus kept together on the general map of the face. In the same way the
details of a tree will be collected on a simple including form which makes
a sort of mat for them. Groups, similarly, are closely gathered up into
masses of balanced form, and such masses are arranged with strict regard
for general symmetry. "The art," as Bayet says, "in losing something of
life and liberty became so much the better fitted for the decoration of
great edifices." The technical means were just as much simplified, and only
a few frank colours were made sufficient, by skilful juxtaposition, to do
all that was required of them. The fine pure blue, or bright gold,
backgrounds on which the figures were spaced, as well as the broken surface
incidental to the process, created an atmosphere which harmonized all
together. At St Sophia there were literally acres of such mosaics, and they
seem to have been applied with similar profusion in the imperial palace.

Mosaic was only a more magnificent kind of painting, and painted design
followed exactly the same laws; the difference is in the splendour of
effect and in the solidity and depth of colour. Paintings, from the first,
must have been of more grey and pearly hues. A large side chapel at the
mosaic church at Constantinople is painted, and it is difficult to say
which is really the more beautiful, the deep splendour of the one, or the
tender yet gay colour of the other. The greatest thing in Byzantine art was
this picturing of the interiors of entire buildings with a series of
mosaics or paintings, filling the wall space, vaults and domes with a
connected story. The typical character of the personages and scenes, the
elimination o