Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/349

 x] ANTIQUE CHRISTIAN PAINTING 331 Antique Christian art, in so far as it was Christian, differed in its subjects from pagan art as the antique Christian literature differed from pagan. But it was slow to develop new aesthetic motives or elements of ornament, and it continued to use the common decora- tive designs of pagan art; nor did it evolve new ideals of human beauty, though it wrought a certain desensual- izing and spiritualization of Greek and Roman types of the human form. Yet this modification of types was but inchoate. Some of the fourth and fifth century compositions were of great excellence, and were to constitute the type-pattern which Christian artists were to follow through the Middle Ages and the Renascence. Yet the incitement and directing influence in their pro- duction was largely ecclesiastical and dogmatic. Theo- logical elements in them outstrip the human. The poetry, the feeling, the sentiment, encircling objects long thought upon and loved, have not yet come. These will germinate and flower in the course of centuries, and pass over into art, which will thereby be completed in the veritable tragic elements of love and pity and terror.^ As in art, so in literature. The ib., L'art ByzarUin, p. 11. In the Anthology, Bk. I, are to be fonnd a number of epigrams addressed to portraits of Christ and the archangel Michael ; also epigrams upon the series of scenes so fre- quently represented in painting. These epigrams date from the beginning of the sixth to the ninth century. 1 The fulness of feeling and the charm of poetry enter Western Christian art in the thirteenth century. The beginning may be traced in the Roman mosaics of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies. For example, the mosaics in the apse of S. Maria in Traste- Tere (1140) and in the apse of 8. Clemente (cir. 1150) show a little sentiment, a little puotic feeling, which was not theological. Yet