444 SOSMOS. 



between Nero and Titus,* for the city had been entirely de- 

 stroyed by an earthquake only sixteen years before the cele- 

 brated eruption of Vesuvius. 



The character of the subsequent style of painting practised 

 by the early Christians, remained nearly allied to that of the 

 true Greek and Roman schools of art from the time of Con- 

 stantine the Great to the beginning of the middle ages. A rich 

 mine of old memorials is opened to us in the miniatures which 

 adorn splendid and well-preserved manuscripts, and in the rarer 

 mosaics of the same period, f Rumohr makes mention of a Psalter 

 in the Barberina Library at Rome, where, in a miniature, David 

 is represented " playing the harp, and surrounded by a pleasant 

 grove, from the branches of which nymphs look forth to listen. 

 This personification testifies to the antique nature of the whole 

 picture." Since the middle of the sixth century, when Italy 

 was impoverished and politically disturbed, the Byzantine art 

 in the Eastern empire still preserved the lingering echoes 

 and types of a better epoch. Such memorials as these form 

 the transition to the creations of the latei middle ages, when 

 the love for illuminated manuscripts had spread from Greece, 

 in the east, through southern and western lands into the 

 Frankish monarchy, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and the in- 

 habitants of the Netherlands. It is, therefore, a fact of no 



* In refutation of the supposition of Du Theil (Voyage en Italic, 

 par 1'Abbe" Barthelemy, p. 284) that Pompeii still existed in splendour 

 under Adrian, and was not completely destroyed till towards the close 

 of the fifth century, see Adolph von Hoff, Geschichte der Veranderungen 

 der Erdoberflache, th. ii. 1824, s. 195-199. 



f See Waagen, Kunstwerke und Kunstler in England und Paris, 

 th. iii. 1839, s. 195-201; and particularly s. 217-224, where he de 

 scribes the celebrated Psalter of the tenth century (in the Paris Library), 

 which proves how long the "antique mode of composition" maintained 

 itself in Constantinople. I was indebted to the kind and valuable 

 communications of this profound connoisseur of art (Professor Waagen, 

 Director of the Gallery of Paintings of my native city), at the time of 

 my public lectures in 1828, for interesting notices on the history of art 

 after the period of the Roman empire. What I afterwards wrote on the 

 gradual development of landscape painting, I communicated in Dresden 

 in the winter of 1835 to Baron von Rumohr, the distinguished and too 

 early deceased author of the Italienische Porschungen. I received 

 from this excellent man a great number of historical illustrations, which 

 he even permitted me to publish if the form of my work should rendef 

 tt expedient. 



