exposed by excavation in Egypt and here, also, well-known types, like the Majesty and the Ascension, have been found.
It has not been possible to speak of the quality of Byzantine art but only of certain leading facts in its history. As a whole it was a wonderful movement of return to first principles in regard to structures and to the free expression of feeling in what we call decoration. Roman art was very largely official, grandiose, and a matter of formulas. The Roman artist was as closely imprisoned in conventions as we ourselves are. Then came a time and an influence which led the people to build what they wanted only by the rules of common sense, and to draw for decorative art fresh draughts from the springs of poetry.
So art was transformed and a great cycle of a thousand years was entered on. Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic are all incidents in its mighty sweep, and before it was spent great cathedrals had been built all over Europe.
Having followed, so far as our space will allow, the main stream of Christian art while flowing through Constantinople and the East, we must now try to trace the broader facts of its development in the West.
It is not to be doubted that, until the eastern civilisation was checked by the Arab conquests in the seventh century, its art had been the true heir of the ages, and that the great upheaval put a stop to its proper progress, and then threw it back in many broken eddies over western Europe. In our first volume we saw that early Christian art was a phase of Roman art modified by eastern ideas. In western Europe, for the early Christian period, there were in the main three influences at work, in the culture of which art is one aspect: the native stock, the Romano-Christian tradition, and the steady, unceasing pressure of oriental ideas. In mentioning the latter we do not try to beg any "Byzantine question." It would doubtless be true to say conversely that the West influenced the East, but here and now we are only concerned with the West and the action of external forces upon it.
In reaction against claims which have been urged for oriental influence in Christian art, Commendatore Rivoira has lately made a powerful plea for a further consideration of the part played by Rome and Italy as the main source of western Christian art, but he confessedly does this rather in regard to structural architecture than to the pictorial and plastic matters which form so great a part of any complete architecture. Further, in regard to the structures, his contention in many cases only avails to shew that those eastern customs, which some earlier writers had thought came in with Byzantine art, had already been taken over by Roman builders. And it must never be forgotten that Roman art itself was only one branch of a widespread Hellenistic culture the prime centre of which was Alexandria.
Quite recently a whole new phase of Roman art has been coming
