When I say that they are not Christian in style, I mean that they are not ecclesiastical. Speaking strictly, from a common-sense rather than from an art point of view, it appears to me that the simple garments and the un-nimbi’d heads of the personages are more in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament than the gold and the gorgeous ornamentation of a later period. However that may be, viewed simply as works of art, they are the natural sequence to Pompeii and the later forms of Roman mural painting.
The case is very different with the large Roman and Ravenna mosaics of the fourth and fifth centuries, but before proceeding to criticise these productions, I should wish to say a few words about antique mosaic work.
The art of depicting objects by means of small cubes of marble, stone, or terra-cotta was invented about 300 years before the Christian era.
From a very simple beginning it gradually developed itself, until under the first emperors we find the most complicated ornaments, and even large historical compositions, executed in mosaic. The use of mosaic for the floors of temples and dwelling-houses was universal wherever the Romans spread. It was not confined to Imperial Rome or to luxurious Pompeii, but is invariably found wherever a wealthy Roman planted his villa, whether in the vicinity of the great Sahara Desert, or in the less savage neighborhood of the Isle of Wight. As your average modern Briton cannot do without his carpets, so the ancient Roman could not be happy without his tessellated pavement. In spite, however, of this widespread fashion, we do not find mosaic used as a means of wall decoration; it was almost exclusively employed for floors and tables. Some of these small cabinet pieces are beautifully inlaid, and, as works of art, are by no means contemptible. In a very few which have been preserved to us, we find specimens of the “opus sectile” of the Romans. This differed from ordinary mosaic by the tesseræ being cut into the form of the object to be depicted, and then accurately put together like a puzzle map. The well-known four pigeons perched on a tazza, discovered at Tivoli, is, I believe, the most beautiful specimen extant of the ordinary Roman cabinet mosaic.
The examples of Roman tessellated work applied to perpendicular surfaces are so rare and so unimportant that we cannot consider them as prototypes of the subsequent gigantic mosaic wall-pictures. The intermediate links are at any rate wanting. There is one, and only one, mosaic, that of St. Costanza, near Rome, which might be viewed as the missing link. It is supposed to have been executed toward the end of the fourth century, and belongs essentially to the decorative school of ancient pagan art. Indeed, so numerous are the little cupids and genii, and so prodigal has the artist been of vine tendrils, that the building containing it was formerly supposed to have been a temple of Bacchus. It is now, however, known that this, the earliest specimen of wall mosaic, was executed not in honor of Bacchus, but as a monument to the Christian Emperor Constantine’s two daughters.
Not until the fifth century do we get to those colossal figures, those blue and gold backgrounds, those richly ornamented draperies, which constitute the true starting-point of ecclesiastical art. We often hear that Cimabue is the father of modern art, but the only reason for making him a kind of art Adam is because his name has been handed down to us. The real fathers of modern Christian art are the nameless authors of these gorgeous though somewhat grim mosaics.
Most art historians have included these splendid works in the later Roman period. They cannot certainly be called truly Byzantine, although they have a decided Byzantine flavor about them, and it is probable that many of them were executed by Greek or Byzantine artists; but, on the other hand, they are so strikingly dissimilar to late Roman work that they ought to be classed in a school by themselves. The forms of the figures are of course stiff and lifeless, if compared to the antique or to sixteenth-century art; but they are quite graceful and animated when compared with the dead ugliness of the real Byzantine work. There is a certain grandeur, sui generis, about them (particularly in the Justinian and Theodora mosaics of Ravenna) quite independent of their size and gorgeous ornamentation, which we never find in later Byzantine work.
The mosaics of the sixth century are in no way different in style from those of the fifth. The finest specimens of this period are the well-known mosaics of SS. Cosmo and Damiano in Rome. The head and figure of the gigantic Christ, which forms the centre, has been much eulogized by critics; but I confess I was disappointed when I last saw this mosaic. Size, and perhaps antiquity, have a good deal to do with the awe-inspiring qualities attributed to this work.
If the art displayed in this figure were really of a high quality, some of its beauty would be retained in a reproduction on a small scale. However much the panels of the Sistine Chapel may be reduced, they always retain their original grandeur, whereas this over-praised figure appears to me to lose all its imposing appearance when copied or engraved on a small scale.
Of historical or Biblical compositions, properly so-called, there are none extant of this period. The cause of this is partly no doubt owing to the nature of the materials then in use. Mosaic is certainly not suitable for figures in action, nor for complicated compositions; but there is also another reason for the absence of subject-pictures during the whole of the long interval between the early Roman emperors and Giotto, and that is, they were not wanted.
There were no wealthy patricians in those dark ages who required their villas decorated, no Mæcenas to give a helping hand to struggling genius. The Church was the only patron the poor artists of the period had, and a very hard and narrow-minded patron she was, reducing men who (for aught we know) may have had some talent, to the level of mere workmen and artificers, strictly limiting the range of their subjects and fettering them with traditional rules.
We are now fast approaching the true Byzantine period of art. Historians tell us that Byzantine or Greek Christian art was the offspring of the Eastern Church, influenced originally by ancient Greek art. It seems hard to believe that these hideous deformities should have descended from ancient Greek sculpture. It is a kind of Darwinian theory turned upside down, but still it may be true.
Ancient Greek does not necessarily mean the art of Phidias and Praxiteles. It may mean the barbaric sculpture which preceded the advent of these great masters, and I confess there is something in the odious grimace and the stiff draperies of Byzantine figures which reminds me of certain very early Greek work.
The introduction of the Byzantine style into Italy seems to have been very gradual. The school existed at Constantinople certainly in the fifth century, and possibly much earlier.
Its influence may be traced in the large Italian mosaics of the sixth century, but it was not till near the year 700, when Constantinople was fairly established as the capital of the world, that it became in all its ugliness the dominant school in Italy.
The Church of the fifth and sixth centuries, with all its narrow-mindedness in the choice of subjects, gave the artist a certain amount of liberty in his drawing and flesh-painting, but about the year 700 even this liberty was denied him.
Certain types were invented by monkish painters, that is, by men who were violently opposed to every thing that made life agreeable. These men, it is needless to say, were quite untrained artists, but in their uncouth way they endeavored to substitute their own ideal of humanity for the real thing, and they succeeded only too well. The ghastly type being once firmly established, all subsequent artists of this school were obliged to conform to it. In the second Nicene Council, A.D. 787, it was decreed that:
“It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters, but the holy fathers, who have to invent and to dictate.
“To them manifestly belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.”
As I have already stated, there is good reason for believing that the holy fathers not only dictated the composition, but interfered pretty considerably with the execution, insisting as they did on ascetic, cadaverous heads and an indiscriminate use of gold.
There may have been another cause besides morbid asceticism which in the ninth century caused the Church to adopt