§ 83, 86. 



HISTORY OF MOSAICS. 313 



of Cimabue, how, before that time, in Italy, painting had 

 been "piuttosto perduta che smarrita;" and that Cimabue 

 learnt by watching the Greeks at work in the Cappella dei 

 Grondi, and studied under them. He also observes that the 

 Greeks were employed all over Italy to decorate the churches 

 and public buildings, until Cimabue, followed by his scholar 

 Giotto, and others, in painting, like their contemporaries the 

 mosaicists, having first learnt of the Greeks, afterwards worked 

 independently, and established a new and truly Italian style 

 of art. D'Agincourt too (in his 4th vol.) gives a regular 

 history of this progress through Byzantine hands, illustrated 

 by examples in each century. We find the same observa- 

 tion made by Flaxman (Lect. p. 146, 242), that Italian art 

 was received from the Greeks of Constantinople ; and the 

 fact is still -more confirmed by this statement of Rosini (vol. 

 i. Proemio): — "Per edificare, per iscolpire, per dipingere, 

 non si proponevano che Grreci . . . . cio che negar non po- 

 trebbesi, perche appare da documenti certi, la pittura sul 

 cominciare del Secolo XIII. mantenevasi Greca. V erano 

 si, come narrano tutti gli storici, e v' erano stati anche, ante- 

 cedentemente, Italiani pittori ; ma senza lasciar nome illustre, 

 senza far degne opere, e molto meno senza procurar degni 

 allievi." 



86. The history of mosaic work is a good illustration of the 

 manner in which so many arts have been indebted to each 

 other for their development ; having alternately excelled and 

 declined, and been afterwards revived by the country of its 

 adoption. Pavements of various coloured marbles were used 

 in Greece as early as the age of Alexander, which were pro- 

 bably the same as those mentioned by Hesiod and Xenophon ; 

 and the ship of Hiero II., described by Athenoeus (v. 207), had 

 floors composed of real mosaics, or, as he says, of small cubes 

 of all kinds of stone. From Greece the art went to Rome, 

 whose earliest mosaics were the work of Greeks ; and the in- 



