Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/368

 360 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. own methods of decoration were not entirely aban- doned ; but the art and civilization to which they were being introduced were so much greater than their own, that their own art tended to succumb. North and west of the Alps, in the early Middle Ages, the antique was imitated and modified accord- ing to the character of the people and the capaci- ties of the artist. New styles developed as the builders and artists of France, Germany, and Eng- land reached the level of what they had borrowed from antiquity and passed on along paths of their own invention. Italy was the home of the antique and was more generally subject to Byzantine influence than any northern land. In spite of foreign admixtures, its inhabitants were largely descendants of the antique races. Naturally the antique and Byzantine long maintained such complete dominance in Italy as, for example, one never fails to perceive as well as feel in the Komanesque architecture of Tuscany. The Carolingian period represents in the north the dominance of the antique and the Byzantine in art. Charlemagne's reign was a titanic labor for order and civilization, and for the extension of Christianity and the suppression of superstitious practices attached to it. The antique literature and knowledge, the antique arts, the Koman civil and political forms, were the quarry whence the Emperor and his minis- ters could draw. Rome was also the preeminent source of Christianity for all the peoples of the north. Any struggle for order and civilization in this period had to draw upon the only civilization and order then