PAINTING, 77 
Delphian with his lyre; also two nymphs or dancing girls (jigs. 11 and 12) 
as parts of arabesques, an Amorette with bow and arrow (jig. 13), 
and another climbing after a fruit (jig. 14); and lastly the mosaic floors 
(pl. 13, jigs. 20 and 22) from the Basilica, which will sufficiently confirm 
our assertion respecting the meagreness of the style and the poverty of the 
arabesques. 
2. Taz Mippte Aces anp Mopern Tres. 
We can very fitly divide the painting of the middle ages and modern 
times into two periods, of which the first extends to Cimabue, the precursor 
of the modern period, while the latter embraces the modern and the latest 
times. | 
A. From the Introduction of the Christian Leligion down to 
Cimabue (d. 1300). 
With the downfall of the blooming mythology of antiquity, there 
appeared in its place a more earnest and simpler religion; which, while in 
itself less adapted to embodiment in visible forms, was not yet sufficiently 
elaborated for introduction into the domain of art. On the cessation of the 
living study of nature and the decline of all higher technical skill, the arts 
naturally sank, and of course painting among them, to a lower and lower 
ebb. Still there was zealously preserved a sort of manual skill of the 
painter and sculptor, which had assumed the nature of a handicraft, along 
with the principles and forms of ancient art. Christianity first appropriated 
to its own use the forms and even many of the subjects of ancient art, and 
gradually shaped for itself, and not without artistic feeling, a cycle of 
images of its own, whose introduction however was opposed by the repeated 
assaults on works of art of which we have already spoken in treating of 
sculpture. In the Christian church there arose by degrees fixed and standard 
forms for the holy personages, a process which was furthered by the suppo- 
sition, that by going back to the oldest representations the actual form was 
preserved. The faces, although rudely executed, were shaped after an 
ideal fundamental form; the costume in the main was Grecian; and the 
drapery was thrown into great masses, after the ancient manner. It was 
not till long afterwards that the peculiarities of the middle ages in dress 
and gestures penetrated into the world of antiquity. But nowhere do we 
perceive an independent treatment of nature, the renewed study of which 
in the 13th and 14th centuries produced a fresh revival of art, and at the 
same time liberated it from those typical and lifeless forms which are still 
preserved in the pictures of the Greek church as the last relics of a perished 
world of art. The pictures which have come down to us from these times 
are chiefly mosaics, and in fact it appears as if the mosaic art had almost 
entirely superseded painting with the usual colors; for with the exception 
of the illuminations of the latter centuries of this period no pictures hardly 
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