CHRISTIAN ART

WITH the development of the new truths which followed the birth of Christ, Christian art came into being, but from a natural and even superstitious aversion for heathen mythology, it avoided anything which symbolized those myths, and this abhorrence of the productions of ancient art led to the destruction of an immense number of priceless works. The statues of the gods were broken in pieces ; the images, the bas-reliefs, the temples, the friezes, and the marble tablets, with their historical inscriptions, were destroyed; and the worshippers of the new God were eager to sweep away all vestiges of those deities whom their ancestors had adored.

After the birth of Christ the arts of painting and sculpture stood still, and at the beginning of the fourth century were no more advanced than they had been twelve hundred years before. Palm-branches, hearts, triangles, fishes, and monograms were engraved upon the tombs of the catacombs, and the efforts to represent the Divine form in painting were ludicrously primitive. Not until an emperor had been converted to Christianity was any improvement noticeable, and when a Christian died at Rome he was frequently buried in a sarcophagus which had been made hundreds of years before.

The sarcophagus, in fact, was the connecting-link between ancient and modern art, and in the beginning of the fifteenth century we find a Medici taking an ancient sarcophagus for the interment of one of his relatives, and having the family arms carved upon it. For a long time the ecclesiastical ordinances prevented the development of sculpture and painting, and up to the sixth century a very strict supervision was exercised over the choice of subjects.

In the sixth century, when the recollection of the idols had grown faint, the fathers of the Church permitted three of the mysteries of the Passion to be represented, while eighty years later permission was given to illustrate all the others.

The history of art during the six centuries between the fifth and the eleventh may be read upon the religious monuments. The great crusade preached by the Emperor Leo of Isaura and Constantine Copronymos against the worship of images (Iconology, 726-754) led to a mighty immigration of artists into the West, where, however, Byzantine art was already firmly established, and where its influences were not thrown off until the end of the thirteenth century. This period is termed the Italian-Byzantine, or Romanesque. In the meanwhile all Europe was passing through the terrors of the year 1000, when, according to predictions universally believed, the world was to come to an end. All art, and even business, was suspended, but when the time passed, and the prophecy was proved to be groundless, the people, in their gratitude to heaven, erected churches in all directions, thus giving a fresh impulse to sculpture and painting.

In future there was no line of separation between the architect and the sculptor, and for two hundred years there is no record of any name among the hosts of artists who worked at the porches, the pillars, the naves, and arches of the great cathedrals. The sculptor was regarded as a mere stone-cutter.

The distinctive mark of this period was the carving of diabolic and grotesque figures, in which were blended an expression of faith and simplicity recalling the primitive age of art. Even at this comparatively late period the artists who executed these great works evidently carried out fundamental laws laid down by a higher authority.

Pisa affords a boundless field of study as to the transition from pagan to Christian art. Beneath the spacious porticos of its Campo Santo we see sarcophagi dating from the period when Pisa was one of the most important colonies of Imperial Rome, while there are others which have been brought there from the East, from Sicily, and from Calabria, and which date from the Middle Ages. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the people of Pisa, while building the Duomo and Leaning Tower, which attract so many visitors to their city, used for the decoration of the exterior these sarcophagi, the sculptures of which, much as they admired them, they were unable to copy. The highest honor they could pay any great personage at his death was to bury him in one of them, and the Countess Beatrice mother of the famous Countess Matilda, and Pope Gregory VIII., who died at Pisa in 1187, are interred in two of these ancient tombs. Charlemagne himself is buried in a Roman sarcophagus representing the interment of Proserpine, and St. Andreo rests in that which formerly contained the body of Tiberius Julius Valerianus, whose ashes were scattered to the winds by the Barbarians.

The sarcophagus therefore, may be said to connect the past with the present to have brought about the regeneration of sculpture ; and when Niccolo Pisano's attention was struck by the subjects which ornamented them, and when he compared the movement, the life, and the anatomical science of the ancient sculptors with the qualities of the stone-cutters employed in the construction of the Duomo, he made a determined and successful effort to shake off the trammels of Byzantine stiffness and the narrow principles of the early Christian period, thereby emancipating Italian art, and founding that school which was destined to regenerate the whole artistic world.

Pisano, who played as prominent a part in sculpture as Giotto and Dante afterwards did in painting and literature, was a Tuscan, so that the art which had its origin in Etruria was born again in a city of the Pelasgi, within a few miles of Florence and ancient Fiesole.