Artists of both shores worked indiscriminately on either side of the Adriatic, as may be divined from the similarity of style in many of the buildings and in much of the decorative work, even without the documentary evidence which is often available. It is to be expected that between the early basilicas of Ravenna and of Pola there should be a great resemblance; but at Parenzo, also, there is a likeness to both those places, and it seems probable that the same school of artists worked upon the mosaics there and at S. Maria in Cosmedin, Ravenna. The decoration in opus sectile also has resemblances, but these seem more probably due to direct Byzantine influence, since, both at S. Sophia, Constantinople, and S. Demetrius, Salonica, the same form of decoration occurs; and it is pretty well established that there was a regular export trade in carved capitals and columns from Constantinople, the same patterns occurring in many places far apart from each other. Comacine work is frequently met with all down the eastern coast as far as Cattaro, as in Lombardy and the Venetian territory. The building at Ravenna known as the Palace of Theodoric resembles the Porta Aurea, Spalato, in its decoration of columned niches; and the material of his mausoleum, Istrian stone, inclines one to look across the sea for the inspiration of the design (which may possibly be a Gothic imitation of the mausoleum of Diocletian), though it must be remembered that Theodoric sent an architect to Rome to study the ancient buildings.
At a later period we have many names of artists who crossed the sea in one direction or the other. In 1319 Uros II. of Servia sent Abiado di Dessislavo from Cattaro to make the silver altar at S. Nicola, Bari. Michelozzo of Florence was at Ragusa in 1463; George of Sebenico was at Ancona rather earlier; Onofrio de La Cava did work at Ragusa; before his time, George of Sebenico's friend, Giovanni Dalmatico, was working in Rome, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Bartolommeo da Mestre was protomagister at Sebenico between 1517 and 1525, and many artists of different kinds bore the name "Schiavone" in Venice during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where the chapel of the Illyrian colony, S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, was decorated by Vittore Carpaccio with subjects from the life of S. Jerome (a Dalmatian by birth), S. George, patron of Dalmatia, and S. Trifone, venerated at Cattaro. Sigismond Malatesta is credited with the design of part of the fortifications of Ragusa, where artists of many nationalities were employed, one of the bells bearing the names of two Dutchmen, Willem Corper Cornelis and Jacob Vocor. The building on the eastern shore which had the most effect upon the western, and indeed upon the whole of the Occident, is the Palace of Diocletian, in which, for the first time in Europe, the arch appears springing directly from the capital without the interposition of the entablature, a building which was almost certainly constructed by Syro-Greeks, probably brought by the emperor from Antioch. All the masons' marks are Greek letters, and many of the combinations of architectural forms are found in the dead cities of Central Syria, in buildings dating from the end of the second century. The method of construction of the domes, the great bearing-arches which relieve the architrave, the exterior niches which decorate the walls, and the architrave turned into an archivolt over the tympana of the pediments all occur at about this period. At Laodicea, Baalbek, Palmyra, and Petra, motifs which were in use till the end of the Byzantine period appear. Tesseræ of mosaic have been found in one of the vaults at Spalato, showing that it played a part in the decoration, as might be expected in so magnificent a building. Dr. Stmygowski says: "What we have in Spalato grew in that corner of Central Syria which we call Hittite, and in the hinterland of Asia Minor, which communicated with the sea by way of Antioch." In Khorsabad a glazed brick frieze has been found in which the horizontal member became an arch over the door. The new thing was the putting it on pillars ranged before the façade, which he thinks was probably done at Seleucia on the Tigris. The plan of the palace at Spalato, with projecting towers, and the soldiers' quarters against the walls, is Syrian, of which examples may be cited at Kasr-el-Abjad and Deir-el-Khaf (which is dated 306). The colonnaded streets are a well-known Syrian town feature, and the plan resembles that of Antioch, as described by the rhetorician Libanios, scarcely fifty years after the death of Diocletian. Dr. Strzygowski concludes that the emperor had seen the palace at Antioch, which was commenced by Gallienus, and possibly was completed. He wished it copied, and therefore brought over Antiochenes to do it.
There are other Eastern characteristics both here and in other places on the coast, such as the sheet of lead upon which the bases of columns are set, as in Byzantine work; the free-standing apse, found at Salona in two places, and in the earlier church at Parenzo; the plan of S. Maria delle Grazie, Grado, with the apse in the centre, and the two chambers flanking it, an arrangement found in a temple of 192 A.D., at Is-Sanamên in the Northern Hauran, by Mr. H.C. Butler, while the former arrangement was seen by Miss Lowthian Bell in many ruins in Lycaonia, as has been already noted.
The Egyptian influence also appears to be made out. Upon heathen tomb monuments of the second and third centuries at Ghirza in Tripoli are columns supporting arches cut out of a thin slab, not constructional, an arrangement just like the Lombard ciborium tops. The connection appears clear. The ciborium was a tomb generally erected over a martyr's grave or the relics of a saint to whom the altar was dedicated, and the form of these tombs appears to have thus been perpetuated. That there were links between North Africa and the Adriatic towns is suggested by various facts. Coptic objects have been noted in the treasury at Spalato, and the patriarchal chair once at Grado has been described.
At Agram a stele is preserved, found at Salona, which is of the shape of Coptic altars. On it is a representation of Jonah being vomited by the whale, and a head, with a curious kind of form at the bottom like the plan of an apse with a rail returned across the entrance. Dr. Strzygowski gives similarly shaped stelai from Alexandria and Cairo, with incised awkward scrolls, and some of Arab date. He suggests that the shape originated with the altars in the apses above the relics of martyrs, and says that the Salona example (which is of the eighth century) is the most ancient that he knows, and the only Western example. The ivory chair of Maximian at Ravenna is another case in point. Maximian, before he was chosen bishop of Ravenna, had made a journey in the East, and visited Alexandria. Agnellus gives extracts from his own account of his visit. Apparently he ordered the chair from the ivory carvers there after his elevation, for the costume in the Joseph subjects, and the choice of that history, as well as the admixture of animal forms in the ornament, point to an Egyptian origin. It seems probable that Ravenna was the centre from which the influence spread westwards. There were many Orientals in the city, Syrians being so numerous that they were able to nominate one of their number for the episcopal dignity. With the taking of the place by the Lombards the way was made open for the best craftsmen to migrate to the more important city of Pavia, the Lombard capital, and so to spread the Oriental influence farther and farther westward, though of course it also penetrated France by the ordinary trade routes through Narbonne and Marseilles. It is a curious fact that the plan of the great Rhenish churches, with the apses and transepts at each end, is found in North Africa at a much earlier date, which suggests direct intercourse, of which no record has survived.
The tracing of the various currents which united to form the full flowing river of that magnificent style known as Romanesque is a fascinating subject, but not one to be taken up at the end of a book which has already run to a considerable length. The fusing of antique Occidental art with Oriental may be said to have been the principal factor in its production; and, though the shores of the Adriatic were not the district in which its greatest triumphs were achieved, it was here that the fruitful union first took place which at various periods since has rejuvenated the dulled artistic senses of the Western peoples with the exciting stimulus of mysticism, of the unfamiliar, of that charm of colour and gorgeousness of effect, which are characteristic of the products of the Oriental imagination.
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