103 



Goths (who had no art of their own, but who, through 

 their king, Theodoric, protected the remains of ancient 

 art from destruction), and of the Lombards (whose queen 

 Theodelinda employed Italian architects, sculptors and 

 painters to build and decorate the Basilica a^nd Royal 

 Palace at Mouza), kept art traditions alive. These were 

 further sustained by the Comacine masters, a body of 

 Free Masons to whom the Lombards granted special privi- 

 leges, and by the patronage and encouragement given by 

 Pope Hadrian, and his friend the emperor Charlemagne, 

 at Rome. During the Lombard period, Italian art, such 

 as it was, was influenced by the east through Ravenna, 

 where Byzantine artists built and decorated the splendid 

 Basilicas of San Vitale, S. Apollinare, etc., etc., with 

 mosaics ; by Rome, which asserted her never dying power 

 through the permanence of those classical traditions which 

 continued all through the dark ages to assert their strength, 

 in the architectural style known as the Romanesque or 

 debased Roman, a style that yielded only partially to the 

 Gothic (which never got a firm foothold in the Italian 

 peninsula) and in that revival of classic elegance in the 

 arts and letters called the Rennaissance, which began about 

 the middle of the fourteenth century, and culminated in 

 the fifteenth. 



Before the year 1000 the end of the world was antici- 

 pated, the arts had declined to the lowest pitch of degra- 

 dation. From this they were raised in the thirteenth 

 century by Niccola Pisano, the true father of the revival 

 of architecture and sculpture, by Cimabue, who began 

 the emancipation of painting from Byzantine thraldom, 

 and by the great Giotto, who died in 1336, after having 

 founded a school of religious art whose mystical element 

 was developed to the highest degree by the saintly Fra 

 Angelico in the early part of the succeeding century. 



