Stones of Venice | Page 8

it expressed; and so would have remained
for ever,--so does remain, where its languor has been undisturbed.
[Footnote: The reader will find the weak points of Byzantine
architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the opening
chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever opened,-- Curzon's
"Monasteries of the Levant."] But rough wakening was ordained.
Section XXI. 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 vigor and freshness of
the religion which animated it; and as that vigor 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.
SECTION XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal.
While in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their
immediate influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in
all its refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was
carried by inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder

imitations of this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the
skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of
their youth; and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely
descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a
barbarous and borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and
consistency. The reader must therefore consider the history of the work
of the period as broadly divided into two great heads: the one
embracing the elaborately languid succession of the Christian art of
Rome; and the other, the imitations of it executed by nations in every
conceivable phase of early organization, on the edges of the empire, or
included in its now merely nominal extent.
SECTION XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not
susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear,
like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the
enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which
they mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual character. But
others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back
to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice creeks
of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the influence was
of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations,
pre-eminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind
on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected
light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had
done their work, and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a
glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons, and the
fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over its golden
paralysis.
SECTION XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and
system to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that
of the Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of
worship. The Lombard covered every church which he built with the
sculptured representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.
[Footnote: Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."] The Arab banished all
imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from
their minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in their character
and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the
North, and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they

met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the