Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/373

 x] THE ANTIQUE IN MEDLEVAL ART 355 antique and Byzantine survive in drapery and cos- tume and in types of form and feature.^ The survival of the antique does not represent the more positive and original side of the development of mediaeval art, which advances by using the antique and in friendly competition with it. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth century mediaeval art culminates in styles organic in their growth, and novel and original. This art, being no copy, has mastered and transformed the suggestions from the past which it has used. But the victory over the antique is not the victory of native northern traits, or methods of decoration, existing in early times and apart from the influence of Roman culture. Such traits and ways of decoration had existed; they showed themselves in early Irish and Anglo-Saxon miniature painting. They even affected the art of the Carolingian period. Here they came in conflict with the antique styles, and the latter won the day. Generally these original elements in their unmodified state neither come to dominance in medi- aeval art nor constitute its greatness. Its growth and greatness spring rather from faculties and capacities, tastes, conceptions, and ideals, evolved and matured in the course of mediaeval progress and development, from which the general educational and evolutionary influence of the antique was never absent. Under the Christian dispensation and the tutelage of the antique, the growing faculties and advancing concep- tions of mediaival peoples evolve styles of art in which antique and Byzantine elements are superseded or transformed. 1 TbU is plain in Carolingian art.