Note 479 — Chapter X

Figure-drawing in early Christian art was for nearly a thousand years primitively barbarous, with occasional exceptions. The rapid decline in Europe, through the art of the Catacombs and St. Clemente at Rome, and the frescoes and mosaics of Ravenna, down to the Bayeux tapestries, is very remarkable. In those inartistic compositions during the early Middle Ages, the figures were drawn facing the spectator, the head and feet in profile, differing in nothing from the Egyptian and Assyrian modes of representation. We can hardly account for this return to childish ways, from which Greece and Rome had so long been emancipated, except by supposing that they came from the imitations of Oriental textiles, which still retained very ancient forms; for instance, the motive of the sculptured lions over the gate of Mycenæ. We cannot say that Greek art in Rome was quite extinct till the eighth century. About that time there was a remarkable revival in England.