Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/271

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 249 camps and cities of the Eastern empire ; ^^ they were the objects it»copi»g of worship, and the instruments of miracles ; and in the hour of danger or tumult their venerable presence could revive the hope, rekindle the courage, or repress the fury, of the Roman legions. Of these pictures, the far greater part, the transcripts of a human pencil, could only pretend to a secondary likeness and improper title ; but there were some of higher descent, who derived their resemblance from an immediate contact with the original, endowed, for that purpose, with a miraculous and prolific virtue. The most ambitious aspired from a filial to a fraternal relation with the image of Edessa ; and such is the veronica of Rome, or Spain, or Jerusalem, which Christ in his agony and bloody sweat applied to his face and delivered to an holy matron. The fruitful precedent was speedily transferred to the Virgin Mary and the saints and martyrs. In the church of Diospolis in Palestine, the features of the mother of God ^'^ were deeply inscribed in a marble column ; the East and West have been decorated by the pencil of St. Luke ; and the evangelist, who was perhaps a physician, has been forced to exercise the occupation of a painter, so profane and odious in the eyes of the primitive Christians. The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion ; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius. ^^ The worship of images had stolen into the church by in- opposition sensible degrees, and each petty step was pleasing to the worship " superstitious mind, as productive of comfort and innocent of sin. But in the beginning of the eighth century, in the full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous Greeks were awakened by an apprehension that, under the mask of Christi- anityj they had restored the religion of their fathers ; they heard, with grief and impatience, the name of idolaters : i^Thcophylact. Simocatta (1. ii. c. 3, p. 34, 1. iii. c. i, p. 63) celebrates the eea.v&piKox' elKa(Tij.a, which he Styles axecpoTvoi-qrov ; yet it vvas no more than a copy, since he adds, apx^TyTTOV to ixeifov oi 'Pco/xaioi (of Edessa) Op-qa-Kevovai Ti appi)TOv. See Pagi, torn. ii. A.d. 586, No. 11. 1-^ See, in the genuine or supposed works of John Damascenus, two passages on the Virgin and St. J^uke, which have not been noticed by Gretser, nor consequently by Beausobre. Opera Joh. Damascen. torn. i. p. 618, 631. [There is an important passage, showing that image-worship was thoroughly established in the beginning of the 7th cent , in the story of Barlaam and Josapkat (see Appendix i). See Migne, P.G. , 96, p. 1032.] I'l ' ' Your scandalous figures stand quite out from the canvas : they are as bad as a group of statues ! " It was thus that the ignorance and bigotry of a Greek priest applauded the pictures of Titian, which he had ordered, and refused to accept.