Owing to this discouragement of invention, one series of pictures is so servile an imitation of another, that design has never improved in Ceylon; one scene is but the facsimile of a previous one, and each may almost be regarded as an exponent of the state of the art at any preceding period.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The Egyptians and Singhalese were not, however, the only authorities who overwhelmed invention by ecclesiastical conventionalism.  The early artists of Greece were not at liberty to follow the bent of their own genius, or to depart from established regulations in representing the figures of the gods.  In the middle ages, the influence of the churches, both of Rome and Byzantium, was productive of a similar result; and although the Latins early emancipated themselves, the painters of the Greek church, to the present hour, labour under the identical trammels which crippled art at Constantinople a thousand years ago.  M. DIDRON, who visited the churches and monasteries of Greece in 1839, makes the remark that “ni le temps ni le lieu ne font rien a l’art Grec:  au XVIIIe siecle, le peintre Moreote continue et calque le peintre Venetien du Xe, le peintre Athonite du Ve ou VIe.  Le costume des personnages est partout et en tout temps le meme, non-seulement pour la forme, mais pour la couleur, mais pour le dessin, mais jusque pour le nombre et l’epaisseur des plis.  On ne saurait pousser plus loin l’exactitude traditionnelle, l’esclavage du passe.” (Manuel d’ Iconographie Chretienne Grecque et Latin, p. ix.) The explanation of this fact is striking.  Mount Athos is the grand manufactory of pictures for the Greek churches throughout the world; and M. DIDRON found the artists producing, with the servility and almost the rapidity of machinery, endless facsimiles of pictures in rigid conformity with a recognised code of instructions drawn up under ecclesiastical authority and entitled [Greek:  Ermeneia tes Zographikes], “The Guide for Painting,” a literal translation of which he has published.  This very curious manuscript contains minute directions for the figures, costume, and attitude of the sacred characters, and for the preparation of many hundreds of historical subjects required for the decoration of churches.  The artist, when solicited by M. Didron to sell “cette bible de son art,” naively refused, on the simple ground that “s’il se depouillait de ce livre, il ne pourrait plus rien faire; en perdaut son Guide, il perdait son art, il perdait ses yeux et ses mains” (ib. p. xxiii.).  It was not till the fifteenth century that the painters of Italy shook themselves free of the authority of the Latin church in matters of art.  The second council of Nice arrogates to the Roman church the authority in such matters still retained by the Greek; “non est imaginum structura pictorum inventio sed ecclesiae catholicae probata legislatio et traditio.”  In Spain, the sacro-pictorial law, under the title of Pictor Christianus,