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riches, are important frescoes, by that great naturalistic reformer in the arts, Masaccio, which would seem by their vigour and their truth, in the dignity they restore to man, and by the beauty with which they adorn womanhood, to enter a protest against the entire series of Christian mosaics, whether Roman or Byzantine, which had so long violated nature and parodied revelation. The churches of Rome are catholic at least in the open asylum which they equally give to the universal art of all Christian ages. In the arts, at all events, the Church of Rome would appear to preach no exclusive salvation. In St Peter's, a bronze statue of Jupiter has been received for St Peter himself, and we think it would have been equally politic, and certainly not less latitudinarian, could a statue of Apollo have been trans-, muted into a figure of Christ. Thus in a charity of taste, which we could wish extended to an equal enlargement of creed, do we find art, not only the most diverse but even the most hostile, made accessory to, and found acceptable in, the same Christian worship. We scarcely can regret so wide a toleration, even though the liberty granted to genius may ofttimes have degenerated into license. We scarcely can object to find that, in the creation of art, Christianity can include a diversity varied as human nature, an empire wide as the world; that the church which may be dedicated to the St Mary is not shut to the Magdalen, and that while angels sing in the choir, demons are permitted to howl in the crypt.

It is time to bring our drive through Rome in quest of these old mosaics to a close. We are near to the Coliseum, that ruin which, like so many remains in Rome, seems to connect paganism with Christianity. While the martyrs were here given up to wild beasts, the Church had fled to the catacombs from persecution, and this once arena of the passions is now dedicated to the Christian virtues by the cross and the altars which stand where the early Christian was massacred. Making the circuit of the Coliseum, we enter the Via Sacra, at the Meta Sudans, pass under the arch of Titus, take a hasty glance at the

bas-relief of the Emperor's triumphal procession, bearing the seven-branch candlestick and the spoils of the Jewish temple, connecting, as it were, Judaism, Paganism, and Christianity. On the immediate right, close likewise to the Basilica of Constantine, and built in part on the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome, is the ancient church of S. Francesca Romana, remarkable for its mosaics of the ninth century. Close at hand, the Temple of Remus forms the circular vestibule to the Basilica of the present church of SS. Cosmo and Damiano, already mentioned for its Roman Christian mosaics of the sixth century. And finally, immediately beyond, is the grand portico to the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which, in its mutation into the present Church of S. Lorenzo, affords another memorable example of the consecration to the Christian religion and Christian art of pagan works otherwise threatened with destruction. Our circuit is now ended. We leave the Palatine Mount, with the ruined palace of the Cæsars, on the left, drive through the Roman Forum among ruined porticos and columns, to which we shall not presume to assign a name, in the dispute between conflicting antiquaries. We skirt the base of the Capitol, pass the arch of Septimus Severus and the Mamertine prison, and so proceeding onwards, leaving the piazza and column of Trajan to the right, we reach the modern Corso, and at length gain once again the Piazza di Spagna, now, as we have said, in a bad sense illustrious by the latest of Christian monuments, the column to that latest of dogmas, the Immaculate Conception. On a future day it may be well to complete the investigation by a circuit to one or two churches through the Trastevere, and by a still more important excursion beyond the walls, to visit those earliest of Christian mosaics of the fourth century in the church of S. Constanza, and at the same time to examine the adjacent and now restored Basilica of St Agnese. In this intermingling of monuments sacred and profane, Christian and classic, the reader finds a characteristic illustration of the Roman and pagan origin

of Christian art. The early Christian church coming into so rich an inheritance, is it surprising that Romish Christian art should be cast in the form of paganism? The Romish Church took from the pagan religion its incense, holy water, lamps and candles, votive offerings, images; chapels on the way-sides and tops of hills; processions, and miracles.* Is it then at all surprising that Christian art should take from the pagan its types and its treatment?

Other portions of Italy are scarcely less rich in mosaic art. The Baptisteries in Florence and in Parma both contain important works; but of far greater extent and splendour are the still remaining mosaics in Ravenna, that great capital and Italian centre of eastern magnificence. Early in the present year we left the coldest of Italian cities, Bologna-the snow knee-deep-for the milder shores of the Adriatic. After a tedious journey of six-and-twenty hours, we reached Ravenna, where Byron lived and loved, where Dante is buried, where nature has spread for twenty miles along the margin of the sea that noble forest of stone pines, and where art, once scarcely less noble and ambitious, covered whole churches with mosaics those pictures for eternity. To the artistic or Christian antiquary, these works doubtless offer many points for investigation and discussion; suffice it, however, to say, that for us they afforded but additional evidence of the conclusions already stated. It may, however, be asserted generally, that these mosaics-such, for example, as the Baptism of Christ in the Baptistery, the remarkably pure and beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd, surrounded by his sheep, in the tomb of Galla Placidia, together with portions of the Apsis of S. Vitale-are more than usually allied to Grecian art, and are consequently marked by greater elevation of type, and a nearer approach to nature. Thus these works, in Ravenna, of the fifth and sixth centuries, contrast, on the one hand, with the debility of the Venetian mosaics of the eleventh, and, on the other, with the

rude nature and low type of the Roman-Christian school.

But it is from the Church of St Mark, in Venice, that an adequate conception can alone be formed of the barbaric splendour of Byzantine art. This marvellous church, written as a scroll within and without, not as the book given to Ezekiel, with lamentations, and mourning, and woe, but as the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the ending, from the time when God created Adam from the dust to the consummation when Christ ascended into glory. It was a pictorial Bible to the multitude, when the written Bible was a sealed book. It was a continuous narrative of successive events, illustrating God's dealings towards the children of men with a fulness, and simplicity, and fidelity, eminently belonging to those early times of unsophisticated art. Adam and Eve, from their first calling into life to their expulsionthe creation of the earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars-the sacrifice of Cain and Abel-the building of the Tower of Babel and of the Ark-the history of Joseph and of Moses, and the fall of manna in the wilderness-all reduced to pictorial perspicuity, all thus pictorially printed, when the art of printing was unknown; all this was indeed to put the Bible, not into the hands of the few who could read, but to place it within the reach of the multitudinous many, to whom the symbol and the picture was the most speaking revelation. The great truths concerning life, death, and eternity, thus set in all the glory of gold, sanctified by all the splendour of rainbow colour, built with enduring stone into the very fabric of the Church, as they were also to be moulded into the very heart of the believer, the whole surpassing all earthly splendour, awed the imagination of the multitude, as a revelation which flashed, not across the sky and then was lost in darkness, but as a revelation put lastingly on record in the dome spanning heaven, as an undying rainbow, which, as the first rainbow, became a covenant of mercy.

* See Dr Middleton's Letter from Rome.

All that could

exalt or appal the imagination was brought within this temple. The richest marbles-the most precious stones-spoils taken from the exhaustless East-relics and vestments of the saints-bas-reliefs from tombs of martyrs-the labour of man's hands in all possible forms of patient elaboration for the glory of God-the mysterious mingling of light and colour with a cavern darkness-the precarious yet constant lamp burning like faith in a world of darkness, joined with the sound of music and the deep chant coming from that sanctuary where Christ and His apostles, in giant mosaic form, are present at the daily worship,-all these art-appliances to devotion rouse every faculty of the soul to transport, save the paralysed intellect and conscience. So earnest and so eloquent an outpouring of religion into art could not long remain without the highest works to testify to the nobility and the purity of the aim. We shail see that the religious ardour which fired these rude and early mosaics became, at a later and more vital epoch in Christian art, associated with heavenly beauty and earthly truth. We have allowed ourselves to speak of St Mark's as we ourselves have often felt, when, laying aside critical severity, we surrendered the imagination to the spell of poetic dreams. It must, however, be candidly admitted, that in these mosaic pictures, which were in olden times, as we have said, the Bible of the people, Christian art was as yet in its cradled infancy.

These Byzantine works, so sumptuous in material and so wide in extent, were at once of classic art the grave and of Christian the cradle. Gibbon, in the conclusion to his history, says that the "decline and fall of the Roman Empire is 'the greatest, perhaps the most awful scene in the history of mankind." In the history of art, in like manner, we know of no downfall so deplorable as that of the classic, instinct with life and beauty, into the grave of the Byzantine, so lifeless and deformed. The description which Gibbon gives of the decay of taste and genius in the Byzantine Empire, literally applies as well to the arts as to literature. "They held," he says, "in their lifeless

hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony; they read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action." Of art, equally as of literature, it might still further be asserted, that, "in the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity; and a succession of patient disciples became, in their turn, the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation. Not a single composition of history, philosophy, or literature, has been saved from oblivion by the intrinsic beauties of style or sentiment of original fancy, or even of successful imitation." That universal law which binds into unity of existence the art of a people with its mental, social, and political life, never received more pointed illustration than in the Empire of the East. Thus Gibbon again, in the following criticism on the writers of Byzantium, unconsciously seizes on the leading characteristics of Byzantine art. "In every page," he says,

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our taste and reason are wounded by the choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, the discord of images, the childish play of false and unseasonable ornament, and the painful attempt to elevate themselves, to astonish the reader, and to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and exaggeration." Accordingly, in obedience to those laws by which a people's thoughts obtain expression through the language of art, we find that the Byzantine mosaics in Rome, Ravenna, and Venice, are characterised by gigantic figures, stiff, obsolete forms" the childish play of false and unseasonable ornament," puerile attempt at elevation, and the exaggeration of what is small and in meaning trivial. Art had, indeed, become the pampered luxury of a court, and of a people emasculated through pleasure and debauched by riches. The decorations of the Church were but in keeping with the adornings of the palace-in both, alike, richness of material supplied the poverty of

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invention, and the servility which attended the monarch in his empire naturally became superstition in the church. We accordingly read that, in the palace of the Emperor Theophilus at Constantinople," the long series of the apartments was adapted to the seasons, and decorated with marble and porphyry, with painting, sculpture, and mosaics, with a profusion of gold, silver, and precious stones. His fanciful magnificence employed the skill and patience of such artists as the times could afford; but the taste of Athens would have despised their frivolous and costly labours: a golden tree with its leaves and branches, which sheltered a multitude of birds warbling their artificial notes, and two lions of massy gold, and of the natural size, who looked and roared like their brethren of the forest!"*

vision, glowing and intense with the ornate colouring of words, and beauteous with the filigree-woven tissue of poetic fancy. But the fairy structure, so beauteous in the distance, vanished into thin air upon the near approach of scrutiny. Foundation it had none, or such only as was false and fancy-framed. In the end we admired in this great work just two things-the illustrations and the eloquence-especially the eloquence with which we shall play and sport in delight to the end of time, as children do with soap suds, blowing them into bubbles and wondering at the rainbow colours taken from all that is lovely in earth and beauteous in heaven. But of all Mr Ruskin's baseless eloquence, the rapture on the olive tree is the most astounding. We have again and again looked into the cupola of St Mark, then at Mr Ruskin's illustration, and then again have once more drunk in the eloquent words-always, however, with the same impression

If the reader doubt the justice of our censure, we would beseech him to turn to the third volume of Mr Ruskin's Stones of Venice, wherein he will find a marvellous, though, as we can testify, a literally correct rendering of a Byzantine olive-tree as wrought in mosaic, in a cupola of St Mark. In words it is difficult to designate such a work. For ourselves, however, had not Mr Ruskin assured us, with his usual emphasis, that the work possesses all the attributes of the olive, "knitted cordage of fibres," with all the "powers and honour of the olive in its fruit," we should assuredly have mistaken his careful diagram for some unknown product, lying somewhere between a kitchen mop and a cow cabbage. If the reader, however, require further confirmation of our strictures upon Byzantine art, he will find it in the inordinate praise which Mr Ruskin lavishes upon this extraordinary work. At the cost of much labour and time, with the reward of much delight, and the penalty of painful disappointment, we carefully read in Venice Mr Ruskin's three volumes, verifying or refuting his statements and opinions by an appeal to the churches, palaces, and pictures themselves. As the closing result of our labours, we found the entire work the baseless fabric of a

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that of magnificent absurdity. With that literary chivalry which gives to Mr Ruskin's warfare the spirit of knight-errantry, he challenges "the untravelled English reader to tell" him "what an olive tree is like." He assures us that "at least one-third out of all the landscapes painted by English artists have been chosen from Italian scenery;" that "sketches in Greece and in the Holy Land have become as common as sketches on Hampstead Heath;" that "the olive tree is one of the most characteristic and beautiful features of all southern scenery;" and yet, that "the untravelled English reader" "has no more idea of an olive tree than if olives grew in the fixed stars." Then the reader's sympathies are appealed to Christ's sake,' "for the beloved Wisdom's sake," "for the ashes of the Gethsemane agony," the olive tree ought not to have been so used. The reader thus highly wrought, and the writer exalted to frenzy - pitch, both at length collapse into the following conclusion:

"For

"I believe the reader will now see that in these mosaics, which the careless traveller is in the habit of passing by

* See, for all the above references, GIBBON's Decline and Fall, chap. 53.

with contempt, there is a depth of feeling and of meaning greater than in most of the best sketches from nature of modern times; and without entering into any question whether these conventional representations are as good as, under the required limitations, it was possible to render them, they are at all events good enough completely to illustrate that mode of symbolical expression which appeals altogether to thought, and in no wise trusts to realisation; and little, as in the present state of our schools, such an assertion is likely to be believed, the fact is that this kind of expression is the only one allowable in noble art."*

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"The untravelled English reader who has no more idea of an olive tree than if it grew in the fixed stars," will be saved from the trouble, and even from the desire of travelling in search of this knowledge, by referring to the drawing which Mr Ruskin has so considerately published as a test at once of his own superior insight and of the world's contrasted ignorance. Sad it is that the ignorant world should, for well-nigh eight hundred years, have looked upon these olive tree mosaics unconscious of their depth of feeling and of meaning," insensible to the "symbolical expression which appeals altogether to thought "-an expression which assuredly ought not to have been overlooked, as we are told emphatically in italics that it is "the only one allowable in noble art." Sad it may be in the opinion of Mr Ruskin that "the untravelled English reader" has been so long insensible to these inscrutable beauties; but to our mind there is something far sadder still that he should fall an unconscious victim to a shadowy eloquence, which he has no means of knowing to be just as worthless as it is alluring. Such of the public as read for a higher end than to feel the ear tickling with pleasurable sound, will do well to test Mr Ruskin's brilliant fallacies by the plainer prose of more truthful writers. ample, as an antidote to Mr Ruskin's Byzantine mania, take the following sane passage from M. Rio :

For ex

"Whenever we meet with a Madonna of a blackish hue, dressed in the Oriental manner, with pointed and disproportion

ately elongated fingers, bearing a deformed infant in her arms, the whole painted in a style much resembling that of the Chinese; or a Christ on the Cross, which would seem to have been copied from a recently exhumed mummy, did not the streams of blood which flow from each wound, on a greenish and cadaverous body, announce that life is not yet extinct; in both these cases it may be affirmed, without fear of mistake, to be a work conceived by Greek artists, or executed under their influence."+

Byzantine art was, as we have said, at once of classic art the grave and of Christian the cradle; but, strange to say, as we have already seen, one thousand years had passed away since the birth of Christ, and yet Christian art still slumbered in precarious infancy-a sleep, too, which had the semblance of death. But the hour of its awakening growth had come. The intelligence of Italy, bursting into new life, expressed itself in a newly-created beauty. Christian art then first began to make itself worthy of the country_of_its nativity, to take from the Italian sky its serenity, from the Italian mind its ardour and imagination. The thoughts which gained from the poet the melody of words, sought from the painter the beauty of forms; and the epic which described paradise, purgatory, and hell, inspired the pictures of Giotto and Orgagna, where Christ, come to judge the world, assigns to man his happiness or woe. But the poetic thought was naturally matured before the pictorial form; and thus while Dante wrote in the thirteenth century, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo did not paint till the fifteenth. By what gradual steps and successive stages the poetry of Christian truths developed themselves into matured and perfect pictorial forms, has always seemed to us an inquiry of the most vital interest: How far the progression of Christian art was resultant from the advancement of civilisation; how far dependent upon the revival of classic learning, or upon a renewed appeal to nature; how far incident to the characteristics of race or the beauties of climate; how much the offspring of a sensuous and ima

* See The Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. 4.
+ See M. Rio's Poetry of Christian Art, p. 30.

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