Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/774

702* The continuance of this connection is shown by the following passage from Eastlake's History:

"In the practice of the arts of design, as in the few refined pursuits which were cultivated or allowed during the darker ages, the monks were long independent of secular assistance. Not only the pictures, but the stained glass, the gold and silver chalices, the reliquaries, all that belonged to the decoration and service of the church, were designed, and sometimes entirely executed by them; and it was not till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the knowledge of the monastery began to be shared by the world at large, that painting in some degree emerged from this fostering though rigid tuition."

Along with the practice of paintings went knowledge of the ancillary art, the preparation of colors. In a later passage Eastlake says:—

"Cennini, speaking of the mode of preparing a certain color, says that the receipt could easily be obtained, 'especially from the friars.'"

In another passage there is implied an early step in secularization.

"Colors and other materials, when not furnished by monks who retained the ancient habits of the cloister, were provided by the apothecary." And further steps in the divergence of lay painters from clerical painters are implied by the statement of Laborde, quoted by Levasseur, to the effect that the illuminators of the thirteenth century had for the most part been monks, but that in the fourteenth and fifteenth laymen competed with them. Various painters in miniature and oil are mentioned. Painters continued to be illuminators as well; they also painted portraits and treated some sacred subjects.

Throughout early Christian art, devoted exclusively to sacred subjects, there was rigid adherence to authorized modes of representation, as in ancient pagan art—Egyptian or Greek. Over ecclesiastical paintings this control continued into the last century; as in Spain, where, under the title of Pictor Christianus, there was promulgated a sacro-pictorial law prescribing the composition of pictures in detail. Nay, such regulation continues still. M. Didron, who visited the churches and monasteries of Greece in 1839, says:—

"Ni le temps ni le lieu ne font rien à l'art grec; au XVIIIe siècle, le peintre moréote continue et calque le peintre vénitien du Xe le peintre athonite du Ve ou VIe. Le costume des personnages est partout et en tout temps le même, non-seulement pour la forme, mais pour la couleur, mais pour le dessin, mais jusque pour le nombre et l'epaisseur des plis. On ne saurait pousser plus loin l'exactitude traditionnelle, l'esclavage du passé."

And Sir Emerson Tennent, à propos of the parallelism between the rigid code conformed to by the monkish artists of the East and the code, equally rigid, conformed to by the Buddhists of Ceylon, quotes an illustrative incident concerning these