Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. EARLY ITALIAN PAINTING. While the Byzantine school was flourishing at Constantinople, Italian art seemed to have preserved just enough vitality to keep itself from extinction, and to transmit from generation to generation a germ of genius destined to a later development. Mosaists still worked at Rome, though not with the old spirit and power. In the church of St. Agnes without the walls are some remains of the seventh century, showing St. Agnes standing between Popes Honorius and Symmachus. The figures are on a green ground. In the desolate old church of San Stefano Rotunda, renowned for its frescoes of horrible martyrdoms, are some mosaic fragments of the same century. Elaborate mosaics of the ninth century decorate the church of St. Prassede. They represent the New Jerusalem, shaped like a polygon, with a gate at each angle, guarded by angels. The hand of the Father holds a crown over the Saviour, who stands within, the twelve apostles?under the symbol of twelve sheep?below him, while toward the gates advances a procession of white-robed martyrs with crowns in their hands. Ninth-century mosaics are also found in the church of St. Cecilia. The year 1000 was the epoch at which all Christendom expected the end of the world; and in the terror and agita- tion of that period art was neglected and mosaic-work abandoned, not to be resumed again, except by some Greek artists in Sicily, till the twelfth or thirteenth century. Meanwhile a few frescoes, much ruined or restored, attest the slow progress of wall-painting. These frescoes are so called because executed upon fresh, damp plaster, in colors mixed with water and some glutinous substances. Some of them, of not later date than the eighth or ninth century, are still found in the lower church of St. Clement, Rom…
