all, that from the earliest ages of Christianity the Virgin Mother of our Lord has been selected as the allegorical type of RELIGION in the abstract sense; and to this, her symbolical character, must be referred those representations of later times, in which she appears as trampling on the Dragon; as folding her votaries within the skirts of her ample robe; as interceding for sinners; as crowned between heaven and earth by the Father and the Son.

In the same manner traditional heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, rudely sketched, became in after-times the groundwork of the highest dignity and beauty, still retaining that peculiarity of form and character which time and long custom had consecrated in the eyes of the devout.

Besides the representations of Christ and the Virgin, some of the characters and incidents of the Old Testament were selected as pictures, generally with reference to corresponding characters and incidents in the Gospel; thus St. Augustin, in the latter half of the 4th century, tells us that " Abraham offering up his son Isaac" was then a common subject, typical, of course, of the Great Sacrifice of the Son of God; "Moses striking the rock," the Gospel or the Water of Life; the vine or grapes expressed the sacrament of the Eucharist; Jonah swallowed by the whale and then disgorged signified death and resurrection; Daniel in the lions' den signified redemption, &c. This system of corresponding subjects, of type and anti-type, was afterwards, as we shall see, carried much further.

In the 7th century, painting, as it existed in Europe,

may be divided into two great schools or styles-the Western, or Roman, of which the central point was Rome, and which was distinguished, amid great rudeness of execution, by a certain dignity of expression and solemnity of feeling; and the Eastern, or Byzantine school, of which Constantinople was the head-quarters, and which was distinguished by greater mechanical skill, by adherence to the old classical forms, by the use of gilding, and by the mean, vapid, spiritless conception of motive and character.

From the 5th to the 9th century the most important and interesting remains of pictorial art are the mosaics in the churches, and the miniature paintings with which the MS. Bibles and Gospels were decorated.

But during the 10th and 11th centuries Italy fell into a state of complete barbarism and confusion, which almost extinguished the practice of art in any shape; of this period only a few works of extreme rudeness remain. In the Eastern empire painting still survived; it became, indeed, more and more conventional, insipid, and incorrect, but the technical methods were kept up; and thus it happened that when, in 1204, Constantinople was taken by the Crusaders, and the intercourse between the east and west of Europe was resumed, several Byzantine painters passed into Italy and Germany, where they were employed to decorate the

Particularly those in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome, along the nave and over the principal arch, which date about the year 440 (those in the vault of the apsis are much later, about 1288); in the church of St. Cosmo and St. Damian at Rome, about the year 526; in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, about the years 527-565; and in the church of St. Cecilia at Rome, about the year 817.

churches; and taught the practice of their art, their manner of pencilling, mixing and using colours, and gilding ornaments, to such as chose to learn of them. They brought over the Byzantine types of form and colour, the long lean limbs of the saints, the darkvisaged Madonnas, the blood-streaming crucifixes; and these patterns were followed more or less servilely by the native Italian painters who studied under them. Specimens of this early art remain, and in these later times have been diligently sought and collected into museums as curiosities, illustrating the history and progress of art: as such they are in the highest degree interesting; but it must be confessed that otherwise they are not attractive. There are some very valuable examples in the Wallerstein Gallery at Kensington Palace. We have also one, lately acquired, in our National Gallery, a little Greek picture of the famous Apothecary Saints, Cosmo and Damian, painted by a certain Emanuel. In the Berlin Gallery, in the Florence Gallery, and in the Louvre,* a few Greek pictures are preserved as curiosities. The subject is generally the Madonna and Child, throned; sometimes alone, sometimes with angels or saints ranged on each side. The characteristics are in all cases the same: the figures are stiff; the extremities long and meagre; the features hard and expressionless; the eyes long and narrow. The head of the Virgin is generally declined to the left the infant Saviour is generally clothed, and sometimes crowned; two fingers of his right hand are ex

Nos. 503, 504, and 505. They are placed together near the entrance of the long gallery.

tended in act to bless; the left hand holding a globe, a scroll, or a book. With regard to the execution, the ornaments of the throne and borders of the draperies, and frequently the background, are elaborately gilded; the local colours are generally vivid; there is little or no relief; the handling is streaky; the flesh-tints are blackish or greenish. At this time, and for two hundred years afterwards (before the invention of oil painting), pictures were painted either in fresco, an art never wholly lost, or on panels of seasoned wood, and the colours mixed with water thickened with white of egg or the juice of the young shoots of the fig-tree. This last method was styled by the Italians a colla or a tempera; by the French, en détrempe; and in English, in distemper and in this manner all movable pictures were executed previous to 1440.

As it is not the purpose of this little book to trace the gradual progress of early art, but rather to give some account of the early artists, and as we know nothing of those who lived in the first half of the 13th century except a name and a date inscribed on a picture, I shall not dwell upon them; only revert to the fact that before the birth of Cimabue (from 1200 to 1240) there existed schools of painting at Sienna and at Pisa, not only under Greek but under Italian teachers. The former city produced Guido da Sienna, whose Madonna and Child, with figures the size of life, signed and dated 1221, is preserved in the church of San Domenico at Sienna. It is engraved in Rosini's Storia della Pittura,' on the same page with a Madonna by Cimabue, to which it appears superior in drawing, attitude, ex

pression, and drapery. Pisa produced about the same time Giunta da Pisa, of whom there remain works with the date 1236: one of these is a Crucifixion, engraved in Ottley's Italian School of Design,' and on a smaller scale in Rosini's 'Storia della Pittura,' in which the expression of grief in the hovering angels, who are wringing their hands and weeping, is very earnest and striking. But undoubtedly the greatest man of that time, he who gave the grand impulse to modern art, was the sculptor Niccolo Pisano, whose works date from about 1220 to 1270. Further, it appears that even at Florence a native painter, a certain Maestro Bartolomeo, lived and was employed in 1236. Thus Cimabue can scarcely claim to be the "father of modern painting" even in his own city of Florence. We shall now proceed to the facts on which his traditional celebrity has been founded.

Giovanni of Florence, of the noble family of the Cimabui, called otherwise Gualtieri, was born in 1240. He was early sent by his parents to study grammar in the school of the convent of Santa Maria Novella, where (as is also related of other inborn painters), instead of conning his task, he distracted his teachers by drawing men, horses, buildings, on his school-books: before printing was invented, this spoiling of school-books must have been rather a costly fancy, and no doubt alarmed the professors of Greek and Latin. His parents, wisely yielding to the natural bent of his mind, allowed him to study painting under some Greek artists who had come to Florence to decorate the church of the convent in which he was a scholar. It seems doubtful