Byzantine art and archaeology / by O.M. Dalton ; with 457 illustrations.

  • Ormonde Maddock Dalton
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Byzantine art and archaeology / by O.M. Dalton ; with 457 illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    finest Roman art owed everything to the aid of other peoples; but no other people could have produced it. Almost all the elements are foreign; they can be detached and analysed, but the result is Roman and nothing else. We think of Virgil borrowing here from Homer, there from the Alexandrine authors, from Greek fable and from Latin legend, and from these most diverse sources constructing his national and Roman epic. While Rome was still the world’s head, expressing her will to a score of obedient provinces, she imposed her art with her law; it was the outward symbol by which her dominion was asserted. But the very close- ness of its connexion with imperial administrative power lent it an official Fig. 4. Capitals and architrave in the Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus at Constantinople (now the mosque Kutchuk Ayia Sophia). (Sebah and Joaillier.) taint which prevented it from winning the hearts of strangers ; it belono-ed too closely to the mechanism of government to stand alone when the machinery ceased to move. It was too political to be popular with other peoples, and it had an effective life of less than three centuries. An art of this kind, so sumptuous, so short-lived, so intimately dependent upon a system of government, could no longer lead when Rome herself was once dethroned: as soon as decadence set in, the underlying Hellenistic elements came to the surface, and with them in all the provinces those indigenous features by which the latest phases of Hellenic art had been corrupted. Such an art bore no longer the authentic signature of Rome. The political decline of the city began before the third century closed; even in the life- time of Diocletian she was no longer the sole seat of empire. When
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