of the highest importance,
because it brings out clearly the opposition between the official art of
the iconoclasts that leaned on the Hellenistic tradition and borrowed
bluntly from Bagdad, and the vital art that drew its inspiration from
the Christian movement and transmuted all its borrowing into something
new. Side by side with this live art of the Christian movement we shall
see a continuous output of work based on the imitation of classical
models. Those coarse and dreary objects that crop up more or less
frequently in early Byzantine, Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian,
Romanesque, and early Italian art, are not, however, an inheritance from
the iconoclastic period; they are the long shadow thrown across history
by the gigantic finger of imperial Rome. The mischief done by the
iconoclasts was not irreparable, but it was grave. True to their class,
Byzantine officials indulged a taste for furniture, giving thereby an
unintentional sting to their attack. Like the grandees of the Classical
Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a
menial trade. They patronised craftsmen who looked not into their
hearts, but into the past--who from the court of the Kalif brought
pretty patterns, and from classical antiquity elegant illusions, to do
duty for significant design. They looked to Greece and Rome as did the
men of the Renaissance, and, like them, lost in the science of
representation the art of creation. In the age of the iconoclasts,
modelling--the coarse Roman modelling--begins to bulge and curl
luxuriously at Constantinople. The eighth century in the East is a
portent of the sixteenth in the West. It is the restoration of
materialism with its paramour, obsequious art. The art of the
iconoclasts tells us the story of their days; it is descriptive,
official, eclectic, historical, plutocratic, palatial, and vulgar.
Fortunately, its triumph was partial and ephemeral.

For art was still too vigorous to be strangled by a pack of cultivated
mandarins. In the end the mystics triumphed. Under the Regent Theodora
(842) the images were finally restored; under the Basilian dynasty
(867-1057) and under the Comneni Byzantine art enjoyed a second golden
age. And though I cannot rate the best Byzantine art of the ninth,
tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries quite so high as I rate that of
the sixth, I am inclined to hold it superior, not only to anything that
was to come, but also to the very finest achieve