306 ON TASTE IN ORNAMENTAL DESIGN. Paet II. 



descent ; and in the earliest bas-reliefs that remain of a 

 Christian age, we perceive the same kind of transition from 

 the old classical to the debased style which appears in con- 

 temporary Pagan works. It has been thought by some that 

 " the primitive art of the Christians was rude, because the 

 only schools where they could study were in the hands of the 

 Pagans, and the only models were images of idolatry ;" but 

 though this may have had an influence on some of their 

 earliest attempts, and they may have been sometimes obliged 

 to depend on their own unaided efforts " to copy nature," 

 and on their " own primitive notions ]of the human figure," so 

 long as they were a poor oppressed community ; this would 

 not have continued after Christianity had become the religion 

 of the state. Nor does this really account for it ; and their 

 faulty attempts at painting and sculpture are rather to be 

 attributed to a general want of talent, and the sinking con- 

 dition of art. 



83. Taste had long held a doubtful existence under the 

 Eomans ; and the people of Eome itself were always remark- 

 able for their want of it. It was there an exotic plant ; not 

 one of native growth ; and the Eomans were indebted for all 

 that was good to Greek artists, or to Greek models. They 

 were even inferior to many other Italians ; and the Etruscans, 

 though they too borrowed from the Greeks, had learnt at an 

 early period to appreciate art ; and continued to the last to 

 show a degree of talent to which the Eomans never attained. 

 It is also a remarkable fact that the revival of painting and 

 sculpture in the middle ages, did not take place in Eome, but 

 in Florence, Pisa, and other parts of Etruria, which had been 

 of old distinguished for artistic excellence. It was in that 

 country too, as Vasari observes (Introd. pp. 26, 29), that archi- 

 tecture first began to improve after the dark ages. We already 

 see in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine how rapidly 

 sculpture was declining (much more, as is usual, than archi- 



