F CHRISTIAN ART

II. GREATNESS AND DECLINE

III. THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES

IV. ALID EX ALIO

[Illustration: _Photo, Alinari_
BYZANTINE MOSAIC, SIXTH CENTURY
_S. Vitale, Ravenna_]

I

THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART

What do I mean by a slope? That I hope to make clear in the course of
this chapter and the next. But, as readers may expect something to go on
with, I will explain immediately that, though I recognise the continuity
of the stream of art, I believe that it is possible and proper to divide
that stream into slopes and movements. About the exact line of division
there can be no certainty. It is easy to say that in the passage of a
great river from the hills to the sea, the depth, the width, the colour,
the temperature, and the velocity of the waters are bound to change; to
fix precisely the point of change is another matter. If I try to picture
for myself the whole history of art from earliest times in all parts of
the world I am unable, of course, to see it as a single thread. The
stuff of which it is made is unchangeable, it is always water that flows
down the river, but there is more than one channel: for instance, there
is European art and Oriental. To me the universal history of art has the
look of a map in which several streams descend from the same range of
mountains to the same sea. They start from different altitudes but all
descend at last to one level. Thus, I should say that the slope at the
head of which stand the Buddhist masterpieces of the Wei, Liang, and
T'ang dynasties begins a great deal higher than the slope at the head of
which are the Greek primitives of the seventh century, and higher than
that of which early Sumerian sculpture is the head; but when we have to
consider contemporary Japanese art, Graeco-Roman and Roman sculpture,
and late Assyrian, we see that all have found the same sea-level of
nasty naturalism.

By a slope, then, I mean that which lies between a great primitive
morning, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour
when men confound imitation with art. These slopes can be subdivided
into movements. The downward course of a slope is not smooth and even,
but broken and full of accidents. Indeed the procession of art does not
so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain. That
road is a sequence of ups and downs. An up and a down together form a
movement. Sometimes the apex of one movement se