Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/201

Rh is in the Western Church, pictures are in the Eastern. They express the colour, the emotion, even the passion of religion.

In considering this subject we will look first at the architecture of the churches, and then consider the pictorial art with which their walls were clothed.

Byzantine architecture is the only style of building that can be correctly denominated Christian architecture. We are accustomed to assign that title to the Gothic order; but neither its area, its age, nor its origin justify us in doing so. Our English cathedrals and the great churches of France are sometimes described as embodiments of the Christian idea, with its far-reaching mystery and its soaring aspiration. Those forests of clustered pillars and long vaulted aisles, like avenues in stone, the fine pointed arches, the "storied windows richly dight," the towers and spires and pinnacles, the quiet side-chapels, the sheltered cloisters—all contrast strongly with the ordered symmetry and clear daylight beauty of the self-contained, perfect Greek temples. Accordingly we have come to take them as expressive of the essential difference between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of classical paganism. To be more accurate, we should say that this Gothic, as rich in colour when it was first produced as it was elaborate in form, really represents only the mediæval mind and life of north-west Europe. It is Anglo-Saxon and Frankish. We meet with little of it in southern Europe. In Italy the Roman and Romanesque styles persisted till they blossomed into the Renaiscent. We have Gothic architecture in northern Italy, in Tuscany, and to a small extent even in Rome, but only as an exotic, a temporary, alien visitor. Its most glorious product, Giotto's Campanile at Florence, that work of jewellery in architecture, with its straight lines and right angles, and its horizontal summit, has many traces of the persistence of the Romanesque about it. Moreover, it must be admitttedadmitted [sic] that on the whole St. Paolo outside the city of Rome represents more truly the earlier period of the Christian architecture of south Europe and St. Peter's the later.