“Your lives!”
As the third century of our era advanced, the system upon which the Roman Empire had been founded showed even clearer signs of breaking down. The supply of capable administrators proved insufficient. Roman citizens no longer took the keen interest in political affairs they had of old. The men who had furnished the brains of the state in earlier times abandoned themselves to lives of luxury and idleness. The concentration of power in the hands of the few governors of real ability and vigour led to a state of perpetual insurrection. On the contrary, the counter-check of subdivision of provinces and powers, devised by Diocletian and Constantine, led to the rise of a bureaucracy which got entirely out of hand. The ideals of Roman imperialism passed away. With them went the art of portraiture which they had fostered. An effete empire led to an effete art.
As we have said many centuries were to pass before the Catholic Church, which fathered the next great school of national sculpture—the Gothic—realized the possibility of embodying its thoughts and feelings in marble and bronze. The early Christians could never disassociate sculpture from the religious beliefs of the Romans. The art was too closely allied with a pagan faith to be acceptable to the new church. This more or less accounts for the absence of a vigorous school of sculpture in Italy between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries a.d.
The circumstances in Constantinople were not more favourable. During the early years of the Eastern Empire Greek and Roman sculpture never lacked appreciation. Constantine made his new capital an immense museum of classical art. But when the Byzantine artist sought to express the ideals of Christendom by means of sculpture he failed. All Byzantine art tended to become more and more abstract and symbolical. It finally became completely divorced from naturalism—the only sure ground upon which a sculptor can stand. At the same time Christian thought and feeling, which the Byzantine artist might have expressed, passed under the control of a Church which would not recognize the rights of any artist. No other explanation of the absence of a vigorous school of sculpture during the Dark Ages is required than the recital of the following decision of the Council of the Church at Nicæa. It refers to painting. A similar decree issued by the Empress Theodora, however, forbade any sculpture save low relief. Sculpture in the round was denounced as entirely pagan. The Nicæan decree may, therefore, be accepted as applying to any art effort.
It ran: “The composition of the figures is not the invention of the painters but the law and tradition of the Catholic Church.... Nor is this purpose and tradition the part of the painter (for his is only the craft) but is due to the ordination and disposition of Our Father.”
Principles such as these ruled until about the tenth century, when circumstances led to their gradual decay and the consequent rise of a new school of sculpture. We shall see that this found a wealth of material in Christian myths and personalities which had suggested nothing to the craftsmen of Rome and Byzantium.