abomination; and after the Council of Constantinople, a. D. 754, he began the ikonoclastic war, by hurling from its pedestal a lofty statue of the Saviour which decorated the entrance of the imperial palace. The mania spread throughout the East, and in every quarter the venerated effigies of the primitive saints were levelled with the dust, and their restoration prohibited by the edicts of the throne.

This celebrated revolution, by destroying the main occupation of the artists, gave a final blow to the cultivation of sculpture in the East. Its professors, precipitately retiring from the persecutions of Leo and the Patriarchs, found a ready asylum under the protection of the Vatican; and almost in the course of the succeeding century the art became virtually extinct at Constantinople. Occasionally, it was employed for the decoration of the churches in bassi-relievi, and trifling ornaments, but the works of the statuary had for ever disappeared. * As the poverty of the empire increased, even this employment for the carvers of marble be

* Agincourt, vol. i. Tab. Hist. p. 63. In casting of bronzes, too, the Greeks seem still to have preserved a portion of skill superior to the Italians; and in 1070, Hildebrand, afterwards distinguished as Gregory VII. being charged by Alexander II. with a mission to Constantinople, procured the brazen gate of St. Paul extra muros at Rome.

came rare, since the cost of the bare material had become a burthen to the treasury.

In a preceding section, I have detailed the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in、 the thirteenth century, and the destruction of the remnants of ancient art, which, having survived the ravages of time and the church, were congregated at the capital.* This event may be considered as the final blow to the very existence of sculpture in Greece; its practice was already extinct, and its productions were annihilated by the soldiers of the Cross. Those which were not borne away to Europe and the West, were destroyed by the barbarity of the soldiery: and Baldwin, the last unhappy monarch of the Latin dynasty, was forced, in the extremity of his destitution, to melt the antique statues of bronze which had fallen to his lot, in order to coin them for the support of his household.

3. The origin of Painting in Greece, like that of architecture and sculpture, is involved in obscurity and fable. Pliny, who has left us by far the most valuable documents relative to its early history,† was himself led into nu

* An enumeration of a portion of these will be found in Gibbon, and a very minute and perfect detail, by M. Heyne, in the Memoirs of the Academy of Gottingen.

The thirty-fifth book of his Historia Naturalis is exclu

merous errors by his partiality for Italy and Athens, and has ventured assertions with regard to the Egyptians and earlier possessors of design, which modern investigation has proved to be in every respect erroneous. But what

ever be the date of its introduction into the Peloponnesus, we have at least sufficient evidence of its rapid advancement; and specimens still remain whose authenticity is undoubted, and whose rude workmanship refers them at once to the earliest era of the art.

Design, both in painting and sculpture, has been referred by the Roman historian, with every appearance of probability, to the outline of a shadow traced by the flame of a lamp;† sively devoted to the annals of painting, sculpture, and design, and contains copious lists of those of the Greeks and Romans who distinguished themselves in each.

• Thus he sneers at the idea of the Egyptians being possessed of painting before the Greeks, and evidently endeavours to bestow the honour of its first invention on the latter. "Egypti sex millibus annorum apud ipsos inventam (picturam scilicet) priusquam in Græciam transiret, affirmant, vana prædictione, ut palam est." (l. xxxv. c. 3.) His assertion of the perfection of the art in Italy, at the time when it was merely in its infancy in Greece, is likewise of dubious accuracy. "Jam enim absoluta erat pictura etiam in Italia." (Ibid.) See the Antiquités Grecques, &c. of M. Le Comte Caylus, v. i. p. 118.

The tales grounded on this graceful incident are various, but all simply beautiful. Such is the story of a shepherdess drawing with her crook the shadow of her companion cast by

which was subsequently improved by the insertion of the necessary internal lines,* and finally brought to a perfect imitation of nature by the use and modulation of colours.† The

the sun upon the sand; or the more elegant legend of Saurias marking with his spear the reflection of his horse. Pliny has adopted the popular episode of Core, the daughter of Dubitades the Corinthian, who suggested to her father the first idea of modelling in clay, by tracing on the wall the profile of her sleeping lover: "Ejusdem opere terræ fingere ex argilla similitudines Dubitades Sicyonius figulus, primus invenit Corinthi, filiæ opera: quæ capta amore juvenis, illo abeunte peregre, umbram ex facie ejus, ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit," &c.—Plin. l. xxxv. c. 12. Athenagoras, in his Apology for the Christians, addressed to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and Commodus, has enumerated all the Greek traditions referring to this interesting inquiry. Zauplov dè τοῦ Σαμίου καὶ Κράτωνος τοῦ Σικυωνίου, καὶ Κλεανθους τοῦ Κορινθίου καὶ Κόρης Κορινθίας επιγενομένων· καὶ σκιαγραφίας μὲν εὑρεθείσης ὑπὸ Σαυρίου ἵππον ἐν ἡλίῳ περιγράπσαντος, γρα φικῆς δὲ ὑπὸ Κράτωνος, ἐν πίνακι λελευκωμένῳ σκιὰς ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἐναλείψαντος, ἀπὸ δὲ τῆς Κόρης ἡ κοροπλαστικὴ εὑρέθη ἐρωτικῶς γάρ τινος ἔχουσα περιέγραψεν αὐτον κοιμωμένον ἐν τοίχῳ τὴν σκιάν Athenagoras Legatio pro Christianos, xiv. "Spargentes lineas intus."-Pliny.

The simple outline, or Monogram, was first distinguished from the ground by being painted with one colour (originally red), whence it derived the title of Monochromaton. Of this early style of painting, four specimens, dug from the ruins of Herculaneum, are preserved in the museum at Portici. To these succeeded Polychromes, in which various colours were employed as the variety of costume and other accidents of

mechanical process thus attained, its susceptibilities of expression and application were rapidly discovered by its cultivators; and it became successively enhanced by the additions of symmetry, beauty, and ideality, conferred upon it by Phidias, Apollodorus, Parrhasius, Zeuxis,

the picture demanded. And finally, the addition of light and shade, together with the modulations of tone, gave the last essential requisite to the art of painting. The account of these successive discoveries by Pliny is brief and judicious: "Græci autem alii Sicyone, alii apud Corinthios repertam, omnes umbra hominis lineis circumducta. Itaque talem primam fuisse; secundam singulis coloribus, et monochromaton dictam, postquam operosior inventa erat; duratque talis etiam nunc. Inventam linearem dicunt a Philocle Egyptio, vel Cleanthe Corinthio. Primi exercuere Ardices Corinthius, et Telephanes Sicyonius, sine ullo etiamnum colore, jam tamen spargentes lineas intus. Ideo et quos pingerent, adscribere institutum. Primus invenit eas colorare, testa (ut ferunt) trita, Cleophantus Corinthius."-l. xxxv. c. 3. " Qui mono

chromatea genera picturæ vocaverint, qui deinde, et quæ quibus temporibus invenerint, dicemus in mentione artificum, quoniam indicare naturas colorum, causa instituti operis prior est. Tandem se ars ipsa distinxit, et invenit lumen atque umbras, differentia colorum alterna vice sese excitante. Deinde adjectus est splendor, alius hic quàm lumen: quem quia inter hoc et umbram esset, appellaverunt tonon: commissuras vero colorum et transitus, harmogen."—l. xxxv. c. v.

"Verely," says Holland, in his translation of Pliny, "no art in the world grew sooner to its height of perfection than it, considering that during the state of Troy no man knew what painting was."