a very
beautiful work on the Alhambra, has been enabled, by the curious
process of chromo-lithography, originally discovered by the Bavarian,
Alois Sennefelder, to popularize and multiply almost indefinitely
the delicate and highly-finished illuminations executed by the pious
monkish artists of the middle ages.

According to Felton, the manuscript illuminators "borrowed their title
from the illumination which a bright genius giveth to his work," and
they form the connecting link in the chain which unites the ancient
with the modern schools of painting. Their works, considered as a
subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and
barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they
lived, whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the
earliest ages of Christianity, or follow it to its most complete
and harmonious development in the two centuries which preceded the
discovery of the printing press.

The primitive Christians were possessed with an unconquerable
repugnance to the introduction of images, and the first notice we have
of the use of pictures is in the censure of the Council of Illiberis,
300 years after the Christian era. Of these one of the earliest and
most curious specimens is the consecrated banner which animated the
victorious soldiers of Constantine. The Labarum was a long pike,
topped with a crown of gold, inclosing a monogram expressive of
the cross and the two initial letters of the name of Christ, and
intersected by a transverse beam, from which hung a silken vail
curiously inwrought with the images of the reigning monarch and his
children. A medal of the Emperor Constantius is said to be still
extant in which the mysterious symbol is accompanied with the
memorable words, "By this sign shalt thou conquer." The austere
simplicity of the Primitive Christians yielded at length to this
innovation of sacred splendor. Before the end of the sixth century the
use and even the worship of images, or pictorial representations of
sacred persons and subjects, was firmly established in the capital,
and those "made without hands" were propagated in the camps and cities
of the Eastern empire by monkish artists, whose flat delineations were
in the last degeneracy of taste.

In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the
East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was
proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted