Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/184

 148 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE artists strive to express saintliness rather than physical beauty and emphasize color rather than form. Both the individual figures and their arrangement together are stiff but stately, like the ceremony of Justinian's court. The Christian symbolism soon became conventionalized at Constantinople; Byzantine painting had always been more decorative than natural, and before long it lost its creative power and simply followed the previous artistic traditions and conventions. Byzantine art also suffered from the iconoclastic movement of the eighth and ninth centuries. Many of the art treasures of Constantinople were later carried off to the West, where they may be seen to-day in museums or churches, like the four bronze horses from Chios which are now at the church of St. Mark in Venice, but which used to stand above the imperial box in the Hippodrome. In literature and learning, too, Constantinople I<;d the Christian world through the eleventh century. Greek lit- Byzantine erature was there preserved and read. From literature 6 ^ to 8oo was a barren period, but from the ninth to the twelfth century there was much reading and writing. This culture, however, consisted largely in "mak- ing inventories" and digests of past Greek literature much as Justinian and Tribonian had done with the Roman law. Such a work is the Myriobiblos, or "Library," of Photius in the ninth century. Suidas composed a famous lexicon about iooo. A compilation of all historians was made h fifty-three books, and many other encyclopaedias and com* pilations were produced. Such books are of the greatest value to the classical scholar, but show little new thought or life. Psellus in the eleventh century wrote on almost every subject and sometimes gives us a vivid picture of his own society. By the twelfth century some lively historians, among them the daughter of an emperor, wrote of their own age. A number of the emperors, in fact, turned author. But as a rule Byzantine literature lacked naturalness and origi- nality, and was written in obsolete learned Greek and not in the language of the people. Classical culture did not die