Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/365

 x] BYZANTINE PAINTING 347 Not until the middle of the thirteenth century, the time of Frederic II, does Hellenism — and Orientalism — finally disappear before the Italian spirit.^ South- ern Italy still contains many Byzantine paintings executed between the ninth and the twelfth century. Byzantine art is dominant in the south of Italy, and also in the northeast, where Venice and Torcello succeed Ravenna.* Yet even in southern Italy quite another art appears, barbarized and yet incipiently Italian. The superiority of Greek workmen was recognized. In the year 1070 Abbot Didier of Monte Cassino imported a colony of them. But again, as in the days of the Caesars, Greek art in Italy becomes partially Italianized. The artists who revived mosaics at Rome in the eleventh and twelfth centuries kept to Byzantine types of composition and yet clothed their sacred figures, except the Virgin, in Roman costume and according to the Roman ritual. Their purely decorative designs imitate the ancient mosaics of the fourth to the sixth century. But in the twelfth century, art in Italy was not, as in the days of the Caesars, to stop with a mere Italianizing of the Greek. Italy was reawakening; she was to renew her youth and then her manhood ; but it was a new youth and a new manhood. New racial elements now made part cloister of the Monreale cathedral, may perhaps be regarded as Norman ; bat there are many carved Saracenic and Byzantine designs. 1 A considerable knowledge of Greek continued in these coan> tries throngh the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and in sections of Calabria and the Terra d'Otranto, Greek is still spoken. See Tr. Lenormant, La Grande Griee, Vol. II, pp. 372-433. s Ravenna was lost to the Eastern Empire in the eighth century.