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 332 Painting Rome is destroyed, as they are the only existing speci- mens which give a just idea of the way in which every available space was covered with these brilliant decorations, in the centuries under notice. To the ninth century belong the mosaics of S. Prassede, on the Esquiline Hill, and those above the tribune of the church of S. Maria della Navicella, on the Cselian Hill. 2. The Byzantine School. Soon after the conquest of Italy by the Longobards, Christian art branched off into two schools, to which the names of the Late Roman and the Byzantine have been given. The foundations of the latter are supposed to have been laid early at Byzantium (Constantinople), the seat of the Eastern Empire ; but it did not attain to importance until the s ixth centu ry. Its predominance marks the period of the deepest decline of Italian art — ■ which, however, still retained, though latent, the vital spark which was to be again fanned into flame in the thirteenth century. The leading characteristics of Byzan- tine painting, which, with Oriental tenacity, it has retained unchanged to the present day, are the use of flat gold grounds instead of the blue hitherto preferred, a stiffness in the treatment of the human figure, — rigid conventional forms utterly devoid of beauty replacing the majestic types of the Late Roman school — -artificially-arranged draperies in long straight folds, and a great neatness and carefulness of execution. The hot controversy as to the personal appearance of Christ, — the Romans maintaining Him to have been the " fairest of the children of men," and the Byzantine Greeks