he zodiac; to the east the sun, to the west the moon. Still
below these were the winds, hail and snow; and still lower mountains and
trees and the life on the earth, with all of which were interwoven passages
from the last three Psalms, forming a Benedicite. After St Mark's, Venice,
the completest existing scheme of mosaics is that of the church of St Luke;
those of Daphne, Athens, are the most beautiful. A complete series of
paintings exists in one of the monastic churches on Mount Athos. The
Pantocrator is at the centre of the dome, then comes a zone with the
Virgin, St John Baptist and the orders of the angels. Then the prophets
between the windows of the dome and the four evangelists in the
pendentives. On the rest of the vaults is the life of Christ, ending at the
Bema with the Ascension; in the apse is the Virgin above, the Divine
Liturgy lower, and the four doctors of the church below. All the walls are
painted as well as the vaults. The mosaics overflowed from the interiors on
to the external walls of buildings even in Roman days, and the same
practice was continued on churches. The remains of an external mosaic of
the 6th century exist on the west facade of the basilica at Parenzo. Christ
is there seated amongst the seven candlesticks, and adored by saints. At
the basilica at Bethlehem the gable end was appropriately covered with a
mosaic of the Nativity, also a work of the age of Justinian. In Rome, St
Peter's and other churches had mosaics on the facades; a tradition
represented, in a small way, at San Miniato, Florence. At Constantinople,
according to Clavigo, the Spanish ambassador who visited that city about
1400, the church of St Mary of the Fountain had its exterior richly worked
in gold, azure and other colours; and it seems almost necessary to believe
that the bare front of the narthex of St Sophia was intended to be
decorated in a similar manner. In Damascus the courtyard of the Great
Mosque seems to have been adorned with mosaics; photographs taken before
the fire in 1893 show patches on the central gable in some of the spandrels
of the side colonnade and on the walls of the isolated octagonal treasury.
The mosaics here were of Byzantine workmanship, and their effect, used in
such abundance, must have been of great splendour. In Jerusalem the mosque
of Omar also had portions of the exterior covered with mosaics. We may
imagine that such external decorations of the churches, where a few solemn
figures to