Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/364

 334 Painting studied in the cathedral of Monreale, near Palermo ; in the Capella Reale in that city ; and in various buildings of Southern Italy and Sicily. The Monreale mosaics have been admirably illustrated, and deserve study as showing how great a mastery of dramatic power could be attained by artists who yet were fettered by many conventional rules, and whose power of representing the human figure was very rude. As specimens of colouring they are magnificent. The manuscript illuminations of the Byzantine school are principally copies of Roman works, and do not call for any special notice. In their purely decorative painting Byzantine artists at- tained to considerable proficiency; their geometrical mosaics are very ingenious in pattern and always good in colour. From the thirteenth century Byzantine art gradually declined in technical and inventive power. The monastery of Mount Athos, in which the old conventional types are reproduced in wearisome monotony, is now the leading school of Greek art. 3. Painting in the Middle Ages. (a) In Italy. In the tenth and eleventh centuries Italian society was still utterly disorganised, and the practice of decorative art was almost entirely discontinued. The few pictures produced were either in the worst form of the Byzantine style, or the rudest reproductions of antique types. As early as the beginning of the twelfth century, however, the Republics of Upper and Lower Italy gained strength and stability, whilst a new and independent style of art gradually developed itself, displacing alike the Byzantine