The Church records and illuminated MSS. give us most trustworthy information of the way in which the altars, the priests, and even the kings were arrayed; and the catalogues of royal wardrobes are also very instructive, as we find how often princely gauds became, as gifts to the Church, commemorative of historical events, such as a victory or an accession, a marriage or a coronation.
Woltmann and Woermann say that the efforts of the Christians in the time of Constantine tended to delay the extinction of classical design in Rome. Of the fourth century they give as examples the mosaics of “Sta. Pudenziana,” where we can still find antique beauty of design. We may also mention the church of “St. Agnese fuori le mura,” which once contained the sarcophagi of Constantine and his mother Helena, and of which the decorations in the ceilings are entirely classical, though the motives had been transferred to Christian symbolism.[483]
The total disappearance of Greek art did not occur till the eighth century, when the new blood infused from foreign sources began to assert itself.[484]
Rome had succeeded to Greece as being the centre of Christian art, which assumed the phase commonly called the Romanesque. This was a conglomerate of Oriental, Byzantine, and Græco-Roman, varied in different countries. Then there were the Scandinavian, and Runic, and Celtic styles drifting from the North; the Lombardic, of Central Italy; the Ostro-Gothic, of Ravenna; the Byzantine, of Venice, all acting and reacting upon each other.
All these rough and inchoate attempts at the beautiful, prepared the world for the acceptance of the Arabic influence, which is said to have been imported at the end of the eleventh century by the Crusaders, to whose pious enterprise some attribute the whole of the splendid Gothic art of the three succeeding centuries. But the marking characteristic of the Arabic arch is wanting; the ogee shape is seldom to be found in Christian architecture;[485] and the pointed arch so naturally results from the intersection of the round arches, that we cannot but look upon these causes as co-incident.
I have elsewhere remarked how often in art different causes co-operate to form a style. The father and mother are of different nationalities, and the result shows the characteristics of its double parentage. The learned antiquaries, who draw their arguments mainly from the form of the arch, must settle whence and how Gothic art in stone came into Europe. It was doubtless the effect or result of more than one cause.
But in as far as it influenced textile art, we have come to the period when it must be studied in Sicily, the half-way house and resting-place of the Crusaders on their highroad to the Holy Land.
Sicily, which had succeeded to Constantinople as being the great manufacturing mart during the Middle Ages, was, in the hands of the Moors, the origin and source of all European Gothic textile art. Yet even at Palermo and Messina they were controlled by the traditions of the schools of Greece, ancient and modern, and by Babylonian, Indian, and African forms and symbolisms.
Byzantium furnished many of their designs, which were sometimes of very remote date, though pressed into the service of the new style and the Church.
These and all the streams of ecclesiastical decoration throughout Europe flowed towards Rome, and were re-issued with the fiat and seal of the Central Church, which also afterwards presided over the art of the Renaissance.[486]