But the blood of the martyrs was likewise, as we have said, the seed of Christinn art. To the earliest believer these catacombs were as holes and caves of the earth-his refuge in life, his tomb in death -at once his house, his church, his sepulcher. But the place of trouble became a scene of triumph. The martyrs' sufferings were at length the believers' glory, and the Church, which was at first a mere grave, grew at length into a temple decorated by art, with the symbols of the Christian's faith. Christianity may thus, in these early symbols and pictures, be said to lie buried and embalmed. The subjects of these first works are simple, and their meaning, though often vailed, for the most part direct and evident. The dove stands for the soul, and, combined with the olive branch, signifies that the soul of the believer rests in peace. If the fish be added, which is the symbol of Christ, the figure reads, the soul dwells in the peace of Christ. Again, a painting of a wicker-basket containing bread, a flask of blood in the center, all resting on a fish, symbolizes the connection between Christ and the sacraments. The fish likewise has occasional reference to the words, "fishers of men ;" and accordingly, we find a fisherman on a bank, with a large anglingline in hand, drawing a fish out of the water, which is supposed forthwith to turn into a disciple. That there may be no doubt about the fact, the fish has been actually found half transmuted into the human form. For the most part, however, the subject is made scarcely less explicit by placing the figure of a man close by, standing out from the water, and ready to receive the rite of baptism! The anchor is, of course, the symbol of hope, and the top seen above the water, in the form of a cross, shows the foundation of that hope. Then, passing from symbolism to pictorial and bass-relief representation, we find paintings of the Good Shepherd bearing the lost sheep upon his shoulders; Daniel in the lions' den; the three Children in the fiery furnace; the sacrifice of Isaac; and Moses receiving the tables of the law, or striking the rock. On sarcophagi, the history of Jonah is a subject also frequently repeated. We find, for example, in one continuous bassrelief, Jonah cast overboard from the ship, then swallowed by the sea-monster, then again thrown out upon the shore, and, lastly, the prophet, as seen stretched

upon the ground in profound sleep, or disconsolate after the gourd had withered. From the New Testament we find the Nativity, the adoration of the Magi, our Saviour turning the water into wine, his healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, the raising of Lazarus, and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

As works of art, all these frescoes and bass-reliefs are wholly unsatisfactory. In style they belong to the degraded decadence of the Roman empire-rude in execution, low in type, and coarse in sentiment. The Christian sarcophagi and the copies of mural paintings, collected by the present Pope in the Christian Museum of the Lateran, do not afford, with the exception of the noble statue of St. Hippolytus, a single example pure in art. have visited the various catacombs in search of the earliest heads of Christ, hoping that in proportion as the work approached the era of his life, it might bear some evidence of authentic likeness. We were, however, disappointed. The head, for example, in the catacomb of St. Calixtus, a sketch of which is given in Sir Charles Eastlake's edition of Kugler's Handbook, bears, in its type and style, evidence of a Roman, rather than of a Christian origin. In the lapse of four centuries, indeed, the tradition of the Saviour's aspect, well-nigh, if not wholly forgotten, it is evident the artist found himself left to the free expression of his own low ideal.

By an apparent anomaly, which, however, admits of easy explanation, those centuries in which Christianity is presumed to have been most pure, are characterized by a Christian art the most corrupt. Christian art came not by revelation, claims no immediate descent from heaven, but cradled, as we have seen, in suffering and helplessness, it grew into the strength and beauty of manhood by the slow process of earthly development. In examin ing the early works already described, this want of beauty has come upon us with pain and surprise. We look in vain for the beauty of holiness, for that calm and placid beauty which comes through patient suffering, or trustful resignation. We seek in vain for those beauties which adorn the Christian virtues, or for the sublimity of the truths which Christianity first revealed. These high attributes of Christian art, in some respects the highest which art has ever attained, were re

served for the development of a later epoch, and the dawn of a revived civilization. The decay of the Roman empire, and the dying-out of the Pagan civilization, are in truth the explanation of the debased aspect of Christian art in this its earliest rise. Christianity, a heaven-born spirit, sought upon earth a habitation, and demanded from art a human form to dwell in. She found in the Roman empire art fallen, and in each succeeding century still further debased. The types of humanity, fashioned by the artist, were even to Paganism a degradation. And the new religion in the first centuries of its growth, still unable in its feebleness to enter on original creation, compelled, indeed, to take art as she found it, necessarily employed such painters and sculptors as the times afforded, and thus was condemned to the humiliation of stamping upon the earliest Christian works the mark and the stigma of a Pagan style and origin.

What good purpose these catacomb pictures and sculptures could have answered it is difficult to understand. For us, however, in the present day, they are of the utmost interest. It may indeed be said that the creed of the early Church has not only been written by the Fathers, but in these sepulchers and churches was actually delineated by the painters. The excavators set to work by the Papal Government may be said to be now exhuming what is in that land, if not an extinct, at least a buried Christianity. Whatever battles the priests of various churches may fight over these old bones in defense of essential creeds, it is fortunately not our province to decide between them. For us, as art critics, these works are links in a great and universal system of art-development and decay. They are the first beginnings of that Christian art which, in subsequent centuries, rose to so great a glory. Even in their very degradation they are a marked example of the universal craving in the human mind for expression through the language of art. A religion may be as yet weak in infancy; an empire may be tottering in decay; yet the experience of the entire world shows us that a people not content to express itself merely through words must likewise speak through the language of forms. This struggling to obtain for the invisible an outward expression, was, as we have said, at first futile; but the faculties and laws which led to the attempt urged on,

though through a series of failures, to the goal of an ultimate success.

But the arts had yet long to slumber during the night of the human intellect. We have seen that as life ebbed out of the Roman empire, and darkness blotted out the light of civilization, the new-born Christian art became in each succeeding century less vital and beauteous. Thus have we the strange anomaly of an infant art marked from the hour of its birth with all the decrepitude of age; and thus, likewise, we find that the growing years which should have added maturity and vigor, did but accelerate decay. The earliest works are the best. The Mosaics of the fifth century, in the Baptistery of the Cathedral at Ravenna, have still some remaining vigor, some recollection of nature. In the Baptism of Christ, which occupies the center of this ornate cupola, the action and bearing of St. John, with upraised arm of baptism, are especially noble, the heads both of the Baptist and of the Saviour showing almost the dawn of the Christian rather than the dying-out of the Pagan type. The figures of the twelve Apostles have likewise some grandeur with, however, an increase of debility. The draperies, though retaining a reminiscence of former dignity, fall into incoherent confusion; and the onward step of the figures, while good in intention, halts in lameness. Other portions of this great and important work, still deeper in corruption, scarcely admit of art-criticism. In like manner, in Rome, the earliest Christian mosaics are for the most part the best. They are remarkable as possessing the rude vigor of Roman art rather than the more refined debility of Byzantine. Thus the head of Christ in the mosaics of the sixth century in the Church of SS. Cosmo and Damiano possesses much nobility, mingled, however, with stern savage grandeur something, if we may be allowed the comparison, between St. John wild from the desert, and Pluto vengeful from Hades.

Throughout the wide world of Christian mosaics, it is melancholy to find efforts so stupendous, labors so vast, with art-results comparatively so worthless. Within, or immediately without, the walls of Rome are ten to twelve churches still in part decorated by these works, and yet, we must confess, that for us, at least, there is not a single example in which the spirit, the beauty, or the purity, of the Christian

grave of nations into the victorious life of a new civilization. Our reward has been that, from the depths in which we found this early art cast down, we have learned so much the more to reverence and love the essential beauty, truth, and goodness of that Italian art which rose into life out of ruin.

Rome," the city of the soul," the grave of so much greatness, which still offers to the mind riches inexhaustible, and fires the imagination with an ardor not to be extinguished-that city which, having at first "conquered the world by the power of her arms, for a second time subdued it by the spell of her imagination"-the wreck of the world's past hopes, and the despair of all present aspiration-containing within her walls the treasures of wellnigh three thousand years-saw the first rise of Christian art in the catacombs and the Basilicas-and now endures art's latest degeneracy in the statue of the Immaculate Conception. In that city the student can walk from the earliest churches, or from the Christian Museums of the Vatican or of the Lateran - from art of the fifth and sixth centuries to Raphael's fresco of Theology in the Stanzas of the Vatican; and in that short walk he will have traversed just one thousand years. All that we have before asserted, well-nigh all indeed that can be told of the progression of Christian art, receives in this city either proof or illustration. Let the traveler in Rome take only one morning's drive, and we would point out to him more in three hours than, by mere home study, he might learn in three years. Let him take his carriage in the Piazza di Spagna, and passing the Palazzo Barberina, traversing the Quirinale and the Viminale, reach, on the summit of the Esquiline, the grand basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. In the stately aisle of this queenly church he will see a series of small mosaic pictures, taken from the Old Testament, and dating back to the first half of the fifth century. To us the great interest of these works has always been the evidence they furnish of the identity in style between the latest Roman and the earliest Christian art. Compare these rude, overcrowded mosaics, in costume, type of figure, and art-treatment, with the bass-reliefs on the Colonna Antonina, with a late and remarkably debased bass-relief of Æneas and Dido in the Vatican, and it will be seen, as already pointed out, that

Christian art began where Pagan ended

that the fall of one and the origin of the other were alike part of that second barbarism which swept over Roman civilzation.

From the Roman Christian mosaics of the fifth century to the Byzantine of the thirteenth, an interval of seven centuries, the traveler has only to pass from the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore to the tribune. In this domed apsis he finds one of the richest and most ornate examples of Byzantine art; the Saviour with glory round the brow, holding in one hand an open book, places the crown upon the head of the Madonna, henceforth Queen of Heaven, who, with one hand raised in wonder and the other laid upon the breast, gently bends forward in humble acquiescence. Beneath the throne are a company of adoring angels floating on the wing, and near at hand are kneeling bishops and standing saints, all gazing upward in wondering adoration. All nature, likewise rejoicing, breaks forth into exuberant growth: arabesques, rich in flowers and foliage, fill the heavens; and among the branches perch or sport gentle doves or the gorgeous bird of paradise. Beneath, flowing across the foreground, is a riverstream, on the margin whereof walks the stag, in whose waters sport fish and birds, or float boats and cherub children, carried by the wind or borne on wings. All this, it must be admitted, from the beauty and the poetry of the idea, reads better in description than it looks in reality. The work, as we have before stated, is an example of the Byzantine school, the distinction between which and the Roman Christian is, however, little more than technical, each being to the ordinary observer about equally removed from the truth of nature or the beauteous spirituality of succeeding Christian art. It may, however, be well for a moment to dwell on the distinction between these two schools of the Empire of the West on the one hand, and the Empire of the East on the other.

Roman art, we will frankly say, is our detestation. We speak not, of course, of Grecian, which, on the contrary, is equally our worship, nor of that Greco-Romano which was, in fact, Greek by parentage, and Roman only by the rites of naturalization. We must confess, however, that we have great abhorrence, for the most part, of all statues of Roman emperors,

however gigantic-of all gladiators in mosaic found in the Baths of Caracallaof all bass-reliefs on triumphal arches-and of those endless processions of Roman soldiers, with captives and spoils, winding their way to the summit of a column. At best such works have a low worldly naturalism, the very opposite of that pure art-treatment, at once ideal and natural, which gives to Grecian art its unparalleled excellence. It must, however, be admitted, that though Roman works have little of aesthetic beauty, they possess, as we have said, a certain rude naturalism, and, above all, somewhat of that Roman energy which conquered the world. But when that energy had become enervated, and nature was either forgotten or corrupted, nothing remained to Roman art but its essential coarseness. At this unhappy moment Christianity sought for art-expression, and hence the origin of the Roman Christian school. Its characteristics will now be understood: a coarse naturalism, in which nature was corrupted -a rude energy, degenerating into weakness. Yet, strange to say, such works obtain admirers. The following is a description of the mosaic of the fifth century covering the arch of triumph in the church of St. Paul, without the walls of Rome:

"Within a cruciform nimbus fifteen feet in diameter, and surrounded with rays, shines forth in the center the colossal figure of the Saviour -the right hand raised in benediction, the left holding the scepter: a delicately folded mantle of thin material covers the shoulders; the form

mation of the Gospel. Like the sound of a hymn of praise, the adorations of the old and new time, of the Evangelists and of the great teachers of the faith, here unite; and whoever length of the walls of the center aisle was formerly occupied with the history of Christ and the Church-consisting of a series of biblical scenes, with saints, martyrs, and portraits of the Popes, all intended to prepare the eye for the great subjects upon the arch of triumphwill find it difficult to imagine how the mosaics of the Tribune itself could surpass in beauty those of the aisles."*

at the same time considers that the whole

mosaic has been now restored; and Mr. In the rebuilding of St. Paul's this Anderson, our English photographer, has, we are glad to say, included the work in his admirably executed series of Roman photographs. Photography, among the many changes it must produce in art, may, we trust, lead to greater precision and accuracy in art-criticism. Were we, for example, in reading the above glowing description, limited to the dim recollections of memory, or even to the vagueness of written notes, we might hesitate before we ventured to pronounce these eulogistic words a pregraph, however, we bring the mosaic itposterous exaggeration. By this photoself for quiet examination into our own room, are not only able to revive our own impressions, but to show how utterly valueless is the entire system of criticism, which dares to characterize such wretched imbecility by terms of praise suited only to the master-works in art. Why, this head of Christ, "grand in conception," "the eyebrows finely arched," "the nose in a straight Grecian line," "the mouth with an expression of mild serenity," terms only to be justified in the designation of a type by Leonardo or Raphaelthis head of Christ so extolled, is, in truth, piteous to look on. Truly he is here the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but it is sorrow and grief in which there is no ministry of angels, no access to the Godhead. The divine aspect is lost-the human even degraded. Lines of corroding care, the cast of a hopeless melancholy, have taken possession of the features, as if the temptation and the fasting of the forty days had been carried over as many years, and the Evil One had It is needat last made sure his empire. less that we should further stigmatize this

* See Kugler's "Schools of Painting in Italy," 2d