June 30th.
“Sir,—I have before me a design for a window which it is proposed to place in a village church in Lincolnshire, as one of a group memorial of the late vicar, his widow, and two sons, clergymen, one of them a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who died in India. May I be allowed to describe the design? The window is of two lights. The dexter represents a cardinal in red hat and stockings, red robe with blue lining, and a nimbus round his head of a color resembling olive-green. The sinister light has an archbishop with mitre, pall, polychromatic vestments, and a blue nimbus round his head; in his left hand a pastoral staff, and in his right the Sacred Heart, crimson, with gold flames issuing from the top. The drawing is signed by an eminent London firm, and is submitted by the present vicar as a suitable memorial of his predecessor, who was an Evangelical of the old school, and of his widow, a lady whose dread of ‘Popery’ was almost morbid.”
Writers on art are fond of asserting that in spite of the repulsive ugliness of the Byzantine types, we ought to be grateful to the school for keeping the lamp of art alive during seven or eight centuries; but I think that the history of the great revival does not bear out this assertion. We find Giotto and his followers hampered with the old traditions. We find Byzantine work rampant in Venice down to the time of the Bellinis, impeding and indeed excluding all the various forms of progress which were spreading over Northern Italy; and it may be noticed that all the faults and weaknesses of the early Italian painters are traceable to Byzantine sources. I question very much whether the revival of art would not have been more rapid and complete had the Byzantine school never existed.
The early reformers, Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio, would have had the great mosaics of the fifth century, and such remnants of ancient pagan art as were then known, to inspire them. They would have been unfettered by Byzantine tradition, and I think it probable that their works would have been better in every respect.
Every one with any experience knows that it is easier to instil sound principles of art into one who is totally uninstructed, than into one who has already contracted a bad style of drawing; and as it is with individuals, so also is it with schools and phases of art.
Then again it must be remembered that although the Byzantine school was the dominant one during the Middle Ages, there were, in Italy, France, and Germany, artists who had no connection with it, and whose compositions, as seen in manuscripts and missals, will bear favorable comparison with similar work by Greek artists of the same period.
I must refer you again to d’Agincourt’s book, where you will find a great number of outlines from these miniatures.
In judging these works you must not, however, form your opinion as to their merits entirely by d’Agincourt’s illustrations. They give a very fair idea of the drawing and composition, but the charm of these small paintings lies in their color and execution, which are sometimes very beautiful.
The Bayeux tapestry, for instance, though charming in the original, becomes very uninteresting and ugly when translated into black and white.
The transition from Byzantine to Romanesque art was so gradual that it is very difficult to decide when the change took place. Byzantine rules and traditions had taken such firm root, that it was not till the end of the fourteenth century that its influence was finally overcome.