The people liked to see their Old Testament stories and the stories from the Life of Christ painted over and over again.  They had become fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young, and did not wish them changed, so that the range of subjects was not large.  The same were repeated, and because of the painter’s fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures should be repeated too.  Thus, whatever the subject pictured, a tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures, and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium, from which city the ‘Byzantine’ school of painting takes its name.

Before 1200, Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries.  It had been the capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions, as happened elsewhere in Europe.  You have read how the Romans had to withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization.  A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture.  But next to Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the city.  In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, and continued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, till the Turks conquered them in 1453.  The Byzantines were wealthy and made exquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory.  While they were painting better than any other people in Europe, they too reproduced the same subjects and the same figures over and over again, only the figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian, English, and French artists, who in varying degrees at different times tried to paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite the same success.  So long as there was no need for an artist to paint anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there was little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what was not wanted.  But in the thirteenth century a great change took place.