his native place. There was a certain uniformity among the priesthood,
whose long cassock was then the more usual dress of civilians in great
cities in times of peace and who spoke Latin among themselves and wrote
it, though often in a way that would make a scholar's blood run cold.
But there was no uniformity among other classes of men. A fine gentleman
who chose to have his cloth tights of several colours, one leg green and
one blue, or each leg in quarters of four colours, attracted no
attention whatever in the streets; and if one noble affected simple
habits and went about in an old leathern jerkin that was rusty in
patches from the joints of his armour, the next might dress himself in
rich silk and gold embroidery, and wear a sword with a fine enamelled
hilt. No one cared, except for himself, and it must have been hard
indeed to produce much effect by any eccentricity of appearance. But
there was the enormous and constantly changing variety that takes an
artist's eye at every turn,--which might make an artist then of a man
who nowadays would be nothing but a discontented observer with artistic
tastes.

I do not think that these things have ever been much noticed as factors
in the development of European art. Consider what Florence, for
instance, was to the eye at that time. And then consider that, until
that time, art had been absolutely prohibited from painting what it saw,
being altogether a traditional business in which, as Burckhardt says,
the artist had quite lost all freedom of mind, all pleasure and interest
in his work, in which he no longer invented, but had only to reproduce
by mechanical repetition what the Church had discovered for him, in
which the sacred personages he represented had shrivelled to mere
emblems, and the greater part of his attention and pride was directed to
the rich and almost imperishable materials in which alone he was allowed
to work for the honour and glory of the Church.

In the second Council of Nicea, held in the year 787, the question of
sacred pictures was discussed, and in the acts of the Council the
following statement is found:--

'It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but
an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters,
but the holy fathers, who have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly
belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.'

It would be hard to find a clearer definition of the artist's place a