f non-essentials, and the continuity of the tradition, brought
about an intensity of expression such as may nowhere else be found. It is
part of the limited greatness of this side of Byzantine art that there was
no room in it for the gaiety and humour of the later medieval schools; all
was solemn, epical, cosmic. When such stories are displayed on the golden
ground of arches and domes, and related in a connected cycle, the result
produces, as it was intended to produce, a sense of the universal and
eternal. Beside this great power of co-ordination possessed by Byzantine
artists, they created imaginative types of the highest perfection. They
clothed Christian ideas with forms so worthy, which have become so
diffused, and so intimately one with the history, that we are apt to take
them for granted, and not to see in them the superb results of Greek
intuition and power of expression. Such a type is the Pantocrator,--the
Creator-Redeemer, the Judge inflexible and yet compassionate,--who is
depicted at the zenith of all greater domes; such the Virgin with the Holy
Child, enthroned or standing in the conchs of apses, all tenderness and
dignity, or with arms extended, all solicitude; of her image the _Painter's
Guide_ directs that it is to be painted with the "complexion the colour of
wheat, hair and eyes brown, grand eyebrows, and beautiful eyes, clad in
beautiful clothing, humble, beautiful and faultless"; such are the angels
with their mighty [v.04 p.0909] wings, splendid impersonations of
beneficent power; such are the prophets, doctors, martyrs, saints,--all
have been fixed into final types.

We are apt to speak of the rigidity and fixity of Byzantine work, but the
method is germane in the strictest sense to the result desired, and we
should ask ourselves how far it is possible to represent such a serious and
moving drama except by dealing with more or less unchangeable types. It
could be no otherwise. This art was not a matter of taste, it was a growth
of thought, cast into an historical mould. Again, the artists had an
extraordinary power of concentrating and abstracting the great things of a
story into a few elements or symbols. For example, the seven days of
creation are each figured by some simple detail, such as a tree, or a
flight of birds, or symbolically, as seven spirits; the flood by an ark on
the waters. What the capabilities of such a method are, where invention is
not allowed to wander into variety, but may on