Pl. 6.
The Empress Theodora. Mosaic at Ravenna. Church of San. Vitale.
At Ravenna we learn much of the early Christian period from the mosaics in the churches. The Empress Theodora and her ladies appear to be clothed in Indian shawl stuffs. (Plate [6].) These, of course, had drifted into Rome, as they had long done into the Greek islands, by the Red Sea or by land through Tyre. Ezekiel (590 B.C.) mentions the Indian trade through Aden. Theodora’s dress has a deep border of gold, embroidered with classical warriors pursuing each other with swords.[64] Works enriched with precious stones and pearls now appear for the first time in European art, and testify to its Oriental impress.
The Byzantine Christian style was essentially the art of mosaic. Its patterns for architecture or dress, easily square themselves into little compartments, suggesting the stitches of “counted” embroideries (“opus pulvinarium”).
In the beginning of the fourth century, when Greek influence was still languishing, we may date the commencement of ecclesiastical art. It was a new birth, and had to struggle through an infancy of nearly 800 years, ignoring, or unconscious of all rules of drawing, colouring, and design. Outlines filled in with flat surfaces of colours represented again the art of painting, which had returned to archaic types, and in no way differed from the essential properties of the art of “acu pingere” or needlework, which was in the same phase—being, fortunately for it, that to which it was best suited.
Therefore fine works of art were then executed by the needle, of which a very few survive, either in description or copied into more lasting materials; and showing that, with the minor arts of mosaic and illumination, it was in a state of higher perfection than the greater arts, which till the twelfth century were all but in abeyance.
In discussing textile art, I am obliged to pass over a part of the dark ages, and to approach the period when it must be studied chiefly in Sicily, which became the half-way house on the high road to the East, and later the resting-place of the Crusaders to and from 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 this art was long controlled by the traditions of Greece, ancient and modern, while fertilized by Persian and Indian forms and traditional symbolisms.