Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/358

 340 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. mosaics was developed in Italy during the centuries under consideration. The analogy of architecture bears indirect testimony to this. Under the Republic and during the first two centuries of the Empire, the Roman genius was creative in architecture, but not even then in painting or sculpture. Upon the con- version of the Empire the basilica type, which had become Roman, maintained itself in Italy. But Roman Christian basilicas show no architectural development from the time of their first construction. The East, however, can show the evolution of a distinct Christian architecture culminating in S. Sophia. Thus the influences which promote the development of a distinct style in Italy, and also tend to retard the barbarization of art, are Greek, and are continually recruited from the East. Naturally they reflect the course of art at Constantinople and other Eastern cities. The general features of Byzantine art in its Eastern home may be summarized as follows : The antique survived, potent and moulding; Christian schools of painting and mosaic appropriated the an- tique, and also departed from it in modes which do not represent decadence, but the evolution of a dis- tinct style — a style, however, not original and new, for the race was mature, and the classic heritage was over- powering. This art shows no spontaneity of youth and scant faculty of drawing new artistic truth from nature. Non-Hellenic elements from Syria, from Per- sia, from the East indefinitely, seem also to have affected the development of Byzantine art. That art took to itself the ceremony of the Byzantine court, which sought to elevate the Emperor above man-