5a 



had entered into the ashes of the antique, and raised up a new art that 

 was to supersede the old, and grow to perfection under a new motive, and 

 towards a different goal. From the reign of Constantine the Great, 

 when Christianity became the religion of the State, architecture ceased 

 to be employed in the erection of heathen temples, and was pressed into 

 the service of the new religion. The art that had rejoiced in the con- 

 struction of the imperial palace and the arch of triumph, that had reared 

 the cupola of the Pantheon over the sculptured deities of paganism, 

 now busied itself in the service of religion, and became manifest in 

 basilicas or churches for the celebration of its rites. Painting and 

 sculpture were soon after called to its assistance ; sculpture, which 

 among the Greeks had been the apotheosis of human beauty, and 

 among the Romans an element of luxury and ostentation, now become 

 the expression of a new and spiritual life, an embodiment of the joys 

 and griefs, the hopes and aspirations of humanity, and, along with the 

 sister art of painting was employed to adorn the new temples with 

 representations of the events and personages of sacred story. 



He did not consider the discarding of the entablature and abandon- 

 ment of the horizontal principle in architecture, which ultimately led to 

 the Gothic system, as a necessary and inevitable consequence of the 

 spirit of Christianity, but as the result of the accidental meeting of that 

 spirit with a depraved taste in art among the Romans. Had there existed 

 at the time sufficient purity of artistic feeling to have regulated the 

 religious zeal, which was indiscriminate against all that was pagan, the 

 classic architecture had, he thought, been adopted by Christian builders 

 in another manner ; had Christianity become the religion of the empire 

 two or three centuries sooner, in the reign of Augustus instead of Con- 

 stantine, when Greek art was respected and still flourished, — had the 

 new art sprung up amid the prosperity and glory, instead of the degra- 

 dation of the empire, — very different, he thought, had been the character 

 of our mediaeval architecture generally. 



On the second head of his paper, — viz., "What are the relations of 

 art ?" — after explaining the nature of the inquiry, he observed, that the 

 oldest art-witnesses extant to the truth of historical record were archi- 

 tecture and poetry ; in music, antiquity had left us nothing intelligible ; 

 and, though Egypt and Nineveh presented us with both sculptures and 

 frescoes, they were, sesthetically considered, far inferior to the architecture 

 they adorned ; the sculpture being, for the most part, rude general resem- 

 blances of form, and the frescoes partaking more of polychromic embel- 

 lishments than works of art. In architecture and poetry the case was 

 different; in these, however ancient the specimen, however rude the 

 material, we found the manifested presence of the ait-spirit. After 



