The differences between the treasures of Aachen, early German architecture, fifteenth-century German sculpture, and the work produced to-day at Munich are superficial.  Almost all is profoundly German, and nothing else.  That is to say, it is conscientious, rightly intentioned, excessively able, and lacking in just that which distinguishes a work of art from everything else in the world.  The inspiration and sensibility of the dark ages can be felt most surely and most easily in the works of minor art produced in France and Italy.[12] In Italy, however, there is enough architecture to prove up to the hilt, were further proof required, that the spirit was vigorous.  It is the age of what Sig.  Rivoira calls Pre-Lombardic Architecture—­Italian Byzantine:  it is the age of the Byzantine school of painting at Rome.[13]

What the “Barbarians” did, indirectly, for art cannot be over-estimated.  They almost extinguished the tradition of culture, they began to destroy the bogey of imperialism, they cleaned the slate.  They were able to provide new bottles for the new wine.  Artists can scarcely repress their envy when they hear that academic painters and masters were sold into slavery by the score.  The Barbarians handed on the torch and wrought marvels in its light.  But in those days men were too busy fighting and ploughing and praying to have much time for anything else.  Material needs absorbed their energies without fattening them; their spiritual appetite was ferocious, but they had a live religion as well as a live art to satisfy it.  It is supposed that in the dark ages insecurity and want reduced humanity to something little better than bestiality.  To this their art alone gives the lie, and there is other evidence.  If turbulence and insecurity could reduce people to bestiality, surely the Italians of the ninth century were the men to roar and bleat.  Constantly harassed by Saracens, Hungarians, Greeks, French, and every sort of German, they had none of those encouragements to labour and create which in the vast security of the pax Romana and the pax Britannica have borne such glorious fruits of private virtue and public magnificence.  Yet in 898 Hungarian scouts report that northern Italy is thickly populated and full of fortified towns.[14] At the sack of Parma (924) forty-four churches were burnt, and these churches were certainly more like Santa Maria di Pomposa or San Pietro at Toscanella than the Colosseum or the Royal Courts of Justice.  That the artistic output of the dark ages was to some extent limited by its poverty is not to be doubted; nevertheless, more first-rate art was produced in Europe between the years 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries between 1450 and 1850.