36 THE STONES OF VENICE

§ 21. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into two great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other at Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque, properly so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative perfection by Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But I wish the reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art together in his mind,* they being, in points of main importance, the same; that is to say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of the art of old Rome itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the fountain-head, and entrusted always to the best workmen who could be found-Latins in Italy and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may be ranged under the general term of Christian Romanesque, an architecture which had lost the refinement of Pagan art in the degradation of the Empire, but which was elevated by Christianity to higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed with brighter forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in its various branches over all the central provinces of the empire, taking aspects more or less refined, according to its proximity to the seats of government; dependent for all its power on the vigour and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as that vigour and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed, and incapable of advance or change.

* This was a great error of mine, in endeavour for simplicity. The Greek school at Byzantium is pure Greek in decline; but that which passed through the Roman mind, and formed Roman and Romanesque architecture in North Europe, was sensualised and brutalised into forms which developed the Northern fleshly or naturalist instincts. Taken up by Niccolo Pisano, it superseded the old Greek, under Cimabue. For full statement of this, see the Laws of Fésole; and at present, to set these pages right, omit from “But I wish” as far as “brighter forms,” and for the second sentence of the twenty-second paragraph, read, “While in Rome, this corruptly enriched Roman art, and at Byzantium, this religiously-pining Greek art, were practised in all their refinements.” [1879.]¹

¹ [The subject was not, however, discussed in the Laws of Fésole; but see Ariadne Florentina, § 67 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]