This relatively slow development of painting was due to its original subordination to sculpture. Independent development of it had scope only when by such steps as those above indicated it became separate; and, employed at first in temple-decoration, it gained this scope as sculpture did, in the ancillary and less sacred parts.
Partly because the Greek nature, and the relatively incoherent structure of the Greek nation, prevented the growth of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the normal developments arising from it, and partly—perhaps chiefly—because Greek civilization was in so large a measure influenced by the earlier civilizations adjacent to it, the further course of evolution in the art and practice of painting is broken. We can only say that the secularization became marked in the later stages of Grecian life. Though before the time of Zeuxis various painters had occupied themselves with such semi-secular subjects as battles and with other subjects completely secular, yet, generally executed as these were for the ancillary parts of temples, and being tinctured by that sentiment implied in the representation of great deeds achieved by ancestors, they still preserved traces of religious origin. This is, indeed, implied by the remark which Mr. Poynter quotes from Lucian, that Zeuxis cared not "to repeat the representations of gods, heroes, and battles, which were already hackneyed and familiar."
The first stages in the history of painting, and of those who practiced it, after the rise of Christianity, are confused by the influences of the pagan art at that time existing. It was only after this earliest Italian art, religious like other early art in nearly all its subjects, had been practically extinguished by barbarian invaders, that characteristic Christian art was initiated by introduction of the methods and usages which had been preserved and developed in Constantinople; and the art thus recommended, entirely devoted to sacred purposes, was entirely priestly in its executants. "From the monasteries of Constantinople, Thessalonica, and Mount Athos," says Mr. Poynter, "Greek artists and teachers passed into all the provinces of Southern Europe;" and thereafter, for a long period, the formal Byzantine style prevailed everywhere.
Of the scanty facts illustrating the subsequent relations between priest and painter in early Christian Europe, one is furnished by the ninth century.
Bogoris, the first Christian king of the Bulgarians, solicited the emperor Michael "for the services of a painter competent to decorate his palace," and the "emperor dispatched [the monk] Methodius to the Bulgarian Court."
