patronised craftsmen who looked not into their hearts, but into the past—­who from the court of the Kalif brought pretty patterns, and from classical antiquity elegant illusions, to do duty for significant design.  They looked to Greece and Rome as did the men of the Renaissance, and, like them, lost in the science of representation the art of creation.  In the age of the iconoclasts, modelling—­the coarse Roman modelling—­begins to bulge and curl luxuriously at Constantinople.  The eighth century in the East is a portent of the sixteenth in the West.  It is the restoration of materialism with its paramour, obsequious art.  The art of the iconoclasts tells us the story of their days; it is descriptive, official, eclectic, historical, plutocratic, palatial, and vulgar.  Fortunately, its triumph was partial and ephemeral.

For art was still too vigorous to be strangled by a pack of cultivated mandarins.  In the end the mystics triumphed.  Under the Regent Theodora (842) the images were finally restored; under the Basilian dynasty (867-1057) and under the Comneni Byzantine art enjoyed a second golden age.  And though I cannot rate the best Byzantine art of the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries quite so high as I rate that of the sixth, I am inclined to hold it superior, not only to anything that was to come, but also to the very finest achievement of the greatest ages of Egypt, Crete, and Greece.

II

GREATNESS AND DECLINE

Having glanced at the beginnings of Christian art, we must not linger over the history of Byzantine.  Eastern traders and artisans, pushing into Western Europe from the Adriatic and along the valley of the Rhone, carried with them the ferment.  Monks driven out of the East by the iconoclast persecutions found Western Europe Christian and left it religious.  The strength of the movement in Europe between 500 and 900 is commonly under-rated.  That is partly because its extant monuments are not obvious.  Buildings are the things to catch the eye, and, outside Ravenna, there is comparatively little Christian architecture of this period.  Also the cultivated, spoon-fed art of the renaissance court of Charlemagne is too often allowed to misrepresent one age and disgust another.  Of course the bulk of those opulent knick-knacks manufactured for the Carolingian and Ottonian Emperors, and now to be seen at Aachen, are as beastly as anything else that is made simply to be precious.  They reflect German taste at its worst; and, in tracing the line, or estimating the value, of the Christian slope it is prudent to overlook even the best of Teutonic effort.[11] For the bulk of it is not primitive or mediaeval or renaissance art, but German art.  At any rate it is a manifestation of national character rather than of aesthetic inspiration.  Most aesthetic creation bears the mark of nationality; very few manifestations of German nationality bear a trace of aesthetic creation.