298 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



people was adorned as sumptuously as the art of the times and 

 the wealth of the worshippers could afford. The Easterners 

 adorned and beautified what lay in front of the altar, while 

 the Western Church built the reredos behind it and filled it 

 with carving and statues. Only the choir screens and altar 

 screens in some of the Western churches remain now as traces 

 of the Eastern practices. 



Afterwards came the great glory of paintings, mosaics and 

 statuary. In the East all extension of art was checked by 

 the outbreaks of the Iconoclasts — the Puritans of the Eastern 

 Roman Empire — who forbade paintings and sculpture in the 

 churches, making them bare and desolate. At last a compro- 

 mise was effected in Constantinople, and icons, or pictures, 

 consisting of paintings, were once more allowed, while sculp- 

 ture was forbidden, and so remains to the present day in the 

 Greek Church. The day when art was once more allowed in 

 the Christian churches of the East is still triumphantly cele- 

 brated on the first Sunday in Lent, known as the Sunday of 

 Orthodoxy. 



The very restraint of sculpture in the Eastern Church and 

 the subsequent inroads of the Moslems, who allowed no art 

 which represented the human face or figure, arrested the de- 

 velopment of nearly all art in the Oriental countries in regard 

 to Christian ideals. True, there was architecture upon the 

 Byzantine plan, which received its highest development when 

 Justinian built the temple of Saint Sophia, at Constantinople, 

 and exclaimed : 'T have surpassed thee, O Solomon !" Even 

 that passed over to the Turk, who also used the Greek archi- 

 tect to build him mosques after the same wonderful pattern. 



At its height that magnificent ecclesiastical architecture left 

 us models which all ages must hereafter study. In the bright 

 skies of Constantinople, Greece and Italy — for nearly until 

 the thirteenth century Italy was almost half Greek — the win- 

 dow space of the churches was a minimum and the art of the 

 painter and colorist filled up the blank walls. 



Yet all wall painting was felt to be ephemeral, something 

 that must soon pass away. Then came the wonderful art of 

 mosaic, an art which had been used sparingly by the ancients, 

 but was used lavishly by the builders of the Christian 

 churches. The magnificent churches of Ravenna — the old 

 Exarchate of Ravenna, a province of Constantinople, situated 



