Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/350

 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. fourth and fifth centuries were the great creative period of dogma and doctrine; again, hundreds of years of human growth are told before the Christian heart expresses itself in poetry with a fulness and power corresponding to those truths of man and God which those early centuries had rendered definite to the Christian mind. In the fourth and fifth centuries the genius of Christianity had not achieved full mastery over the arts of painting and poetry ; it had not fully penetrated and transformed them ; as yet it could not adequately express itself and the sentiments and emotions of the Christian soul through these noble mediums of human expression. III. Byzantine Painting The history of Christian painting and sculpture in Italy and the West after the fifth century cannot easily be divided into periods. But the processes can be dis- tinguished, through which emerged the art of the thirteenth century. Christian in style, feeling, and sentiment, as well as in contents. These processes these elements are still very faint. They become more pronounced in Torriti's "Coronation of the Virgin," in the apse of S. Maria Maggiore (1296), and still more in the lovely mosaics depicting the Virgin's life, in the lower zone of the apse of S. Maria in Trastevere (cir. 1290), by Cavallini. One may say as to these mosaics, that the stags which drink the waters of life have become eager for them ; the angels are not only decorative, but have love and tears and pity ; and the flowers have become lovely, have become even the " seintes flurs " of Paradise, on which the soul of Roland may repose. Like- wise the growth of feeling and poetic sentiment may be observed in the Romanesque and Gothic sculpture of France and in the great advance of painting in Italy with Giotto and Duccio.