love of luxury
survived in Rome the taste for art.

[Illustration: Pl. 6.
The Empress Theodora. Mosaic at Ravenna. Church of San. Vitale.]

At Ravenna we learn much of the early Christian period from the
mosaics in the churches. The Empress Theodora and her ladies appear to
be clothed in Indian shawl stuffs. (Plate 6.) These, of course, had
drifted into Rome, as they had long done into the Greek islands, by
the Red Sea or by land through Tyre. Ezekiel (590 B.C.) mentions the
Indian trade through Aden. Theodora's dress has a deep border of gold,
embroidered with classical warriors pursuing each other with
swords.[64] Works enriched with precious stones and pearls now appear
for the first time in European art, and testify to its Oriental
impress.

The Byzantine Christian style was essentially the art of mosaic. Its
patterns for architecture or dress, easily square themselves into
little compartments, suggesting the stitches of "counted" embroideries
("opus pulvinarium").

In the beginning of the fourth century, when Greek influence was still
languishing, we may date the commencement of ecclesiastical art. It
was a new birth, and had to struggle through an infancy of nearly 800
years, ignoring, or unconscious of all rules of drawing, colouring,
and design. Outlines filled in with flat surfaces of colours
represented again the art of painting, which had returned to archaic
types, and in no way differed from the essential properties of the art
of "acu pingere" or needlework, which was in the same phase--being,
fortunately for it, that to which it was best suited.

Therefore fine works of art were then executed by the needle, of which
a very few survive, either in description or copied into more lasting
materials; and showing that, with the minor arts of mosaic and
illumination, it was in a state of higher perfection than the greater
arts, which till the twelfth century were all but in abeyance.

In discussing textile art, I am obliged to pass over a part of the
dark ages, and to approach the period when it must be studied chiefly
in Sicily, which became the half-way house on the high road to the
East, and later the resting-place of the Crusaders to and from the
Holy Land.

Sicily, which had succeeded to Constantinople as being the great
manufacturing mart during the Middle Ages, was in the hands of the
Moors, the origin and source of all European Gothic textile art. Yet
even at Palermo and Messina this art wa