significance, as we
can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile room at South Kensington.
Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles are more like works of
art than anything that had been produced in the Roman Empire for more
than four hundred years. Egyptian paintings of the third century bear
less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit. But at the
beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato,
where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the
East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski,
from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi
in Isauria. The century in which the East finally dominated the West
(350-450) is a period of incubation. It is a time of disconcerting
activity that precedes the unmistakable launch of art upon the Christian
slope. I would confidently assert that every artistic birth is preceded
by a period of uneasy gestation in which the unborn child acquires the
organs and energy that are to carry it forward on its long journey, if
only I possessed the data that would give a tottering support to so
comforting a generalisation. Alas! the births of the great slopes of
antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute
researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling
discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries. Of these
critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can
compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own
conclusions.

In 450 they built the lovely Galla Placidia at Ravenna. It is a building
essentially un-Roman; that is to say, the Romanism that clings to it is
accidental and adds nothing to its significance. The mosaics within,
however, are still coarsely classical. There is a nasty, woolly realism
about the sheep, and about the good shepherd more than a suspicion of
the stodgy, Graeco-Roman, Apollo. Imitation still fights, though it
fights a losing battle, with significant form. When S. Vitale was begun
in 526 the battle was won. Sta. Sophia at Constantinople was building
between 532 and 537; the finest mosaics in S. Vitale, S.
Apollinare-Nuovo and S. Apollinare-in-Classe belong to the sixth
century; so do SS. Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople and the Duomo
at Parenzo. In fact, to the sixth century belong the most majestic
monuments of Byzantine art. It is the primitive and supreme summit of
th