There were no wealthy patricians in those dark ages who required their villas decorated, no Mæcenas to give a helping hand to struggling genius. The Church was the only patron the poor artists of the period had, and a very hard and narrow-minded patron she was, reducing men who (for aught we know) may have had some talent, to the level of mere workmen and artificers, strictly limiting the range of their subjects and fettering them with traditional rules.
We are now fast approaching the true Byzantine period of art. Historians tell us that Byzantine or Greek Christian art was the offspring of the Eastern Church, influenced originally by ancient Greek art. It seems hard to believe that these hideous deformities should have descended from ancient Greek sculpture. It is a kind of Darwinian theory turned upside down, but still it may be true.
Ancient Greek does not necessarily mean the art of Phidias and Praxiteles. It may mean the barbaric sculpture which preceded the advent of these great masters, and I confess there is something in the odious grimace and the stiff draperies of Byzantine figures which reminds me of certain very early Greek work.
The introduction of the Byzantine style into Italy seems to have been very gradual. The school existed at Constantinople certainly in the fifth century, and possibly much earlier.
Its influence may be traced in the large Italian mosaics of the sixth century, but it was not till near the year 700, when Constantinople was fairly established as the capital of the world, that it became in all its ugliness the dominant school in Italy.
The Church of the fifth and sixth centuries, with all its narrow-mindedness in the choice of subjects, gave the artist a certain amount of liberty in his drawing and flesh-painting, but about the year 700 even this liberty was denied him.
Certain types were invented by monkish painters, that is, by men who were violently opposed to every thing that made life agreeable. These men, it is needless to say, were quite untrained artists, but in their uncouth way they endeavored to substitute their own ideal of humanity for the real thing, and they succeeded only too well. The ghastly type being once firmly established, all subsequent artists of this school were obliged to conform to it. In the second Nicene Council, A.D. 787, it was decreed that:
“It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters, but the holy fathers, who have to invent and to dictate.
“To them manifestly belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.”
As I have already stated, there is good reason for believing that the holy fathers not only dictated the composition, but interfered pretty considerably with the execution, insisting as they did on ascetic, cadaverous heads and an indiscriminate use of gold.