hes with
leaves and flowers, birds, masks, and floating genii.

In Byzantine painting too, the influence of antiquity was still
visible, especially in a Psaltery with a Commentary and fourteen
large pictures. David appears here as a shepherd; a beautiful woman's
form, exhibiting the melody, is leaning with her left arm upon his
shoulder; a nymph's head peeps out of the foliage; and in front we
have Bethlehem, and the mountain god resting in a bold position under
a rock; sheep, goats, and water are close by, and a landscape with
classic buildings, streams, and mountains forms the background; it is
very poetically conceived. Elsewhere, too, personifications recur, in
which classic beauty is still visible, mixed with severe Christian
forms.

At the end of the tenth century began the Romantic period, which
closed in the thirteenth.

The brilliant progress made by architecture paved the way for the
other arts; minds trained in its laws began to look for law in
organic Nature too, and were no longer content with the old uncertain
and arbitrary shapes. But as no independent feeling for Nature, in
the widest sense of the term, existed, mediaeval art treated her, not
according to her own laws, but to those of architecture. With the
development of the Gothic style, from the thirteenth century on, art
became a citizen's craft, a branch of industry. Heretofore it had
possessed but one means of expression--religious festival or
ceremony, severely ecclesiastical. This limit was now removed. The
artist lived a wide life, open to impressions from Nature, his
imagination fed by poetry with new ideas and feelings, and constantly
stimulated by the love of pleasure, which was so vehement among all
classes that it turned every civil and ecclesiastical event to
histrionic purposes, and even made its influence felt upon the
clergy. The strong religious feeling which pervaded the Middle Ages
still ruled, and even rose to greater enthusiasm, in accordance with
the spirit of the day; but it was no longer a matter of blind
submission of the will, but of conscious acceptance.

It is true that knowledge of the external world was as yet very
limited; the painter had not explored and mastered it, but only used
it as a means to represent a certain realm of feeling, studying it
just so far as this demanded. We have seen the same in the case of
poetry. The beginnings of realistic painting were visible, although,
as, for example, in representing an