sity to delight in a
facsimile, or in an idealized version of nature, survives in the very
common satisfaction and joy--whether cultivated or uncultivated---
derived from looking at pictures, thinking over their details, striving
to understand the meaning of the painters, and proceeding farther to
consider the lives and times which throw light on works of genius. Music
itself is not more universally and gladly listened and responded to,
than pictures are looked at and remembered.

Thus I have no fear of failing to interest you, my readers, in my
subject if I can only treat it sympathetically,--enter at a humble
distance into the spirit of the painters and of their paintings, and
place before you some of the paintings by reverent and loving
word-painting such as others have achieved, and such as I may strive to
attain to, that you may be in a sort early familiar with these
paintings, before you see them in engravings and photographs, and on
canvas and in fresco, as I trust you may be privileged to see many of
them, when you may hail them not only for what they are, the glories of
art, but for what they have been to you in thoughts of beauty and high
desires.

Of the old Greek paintings, of which there are left isolated specimens
dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii, I cannot afford to say anything, and
of the more modern Greek art which was spread over Europe after the fall
of Constantinople I need on Europe the birth-place of painting as of
other arts, that Greek painting which illustrated early Christianity,
was painting in its decline and decay, borrowing not only superstitious
conventionalities, but barbaric attributes of gilding and blazoning to
hide its infirmity and poverty. Virgins of the same weak and meaningless
type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs
in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to
bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a
similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings
with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the
sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are
very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations,
and as illustrations of faith; but they present no intrinsic beauty or
worth. They are not only clumsy and childish designs ill executed, but
they are rendered unintelligible to all save the initiated in such
hieroglyphi