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Rh conscious of founding a new style. Architecture, like every other art, has followed a natural and gradual development from the beginning, at any rate till the Renaissance. First one improvement was added, then another; and it is only long afterwards that people, seeing their buildings, can mark changes sufficiently important to warrant a new name. Generally the change is so gradual that no one can say exactly when it took place. But in this case the city of Constantine and the Churches appear at such a definite moment of the evolution and themselves help so much to mark and spread the new movement, that nowhere in the history of architecture before the Renaissance can one draw so clear a line as between the old Roman-Greek and the new Byzantine styles. And no style is so well named as this last. The buildings of Byzantium are its classical examples, and represent its highest perfection. It has always been the artistic expression of the Churches that obey the Byzantine Patriarch, or were founded by him, and it still exists, being the only real and unconscious artistic tradition in Europe, in the Byzantine monasteries. The Byzantine question is only whether it really spread over Southern Europe from Constantinople, or whether the same influences, working in parallel lines, produced the same effect independently. In Italy and Southern France, at Rome, especially at Ravenna, are buildings, carving, most of all mosaics, that obviously belong to the same school as those in Constantinople, Illyricum, and Asia Minor. It used to be supposed that these were the work of Greek artists sent from the Bosphorus, and the fact that the best examples of such work are found in Ravenna, which had most connection with Constantinople (since the Emperor's Exarch sat there), was looked upon as proof. It was in this sense that people used to call the Ravenna mosaics Byzantine. But now the other theory has come to the fore. It is urged that much of the work at Ravenna was done while the Goth ruled there, before Belisarius conquered it back for the Emperor (540), and