appalling demoralisation. For a parallel, I suppose, they recalled the
shameful imprudence of the Magdalene. There were people at
Constantinople who took art seriously, though in a rather too literary
spirit--"dicunt enim artem pictoriam piam esse." This sort of thing had
to be stopped. Early in the eighth century began the iconoclast
onslaught. The history of that hundred years' war, in which the popular
party carried on a spirited and finally successful resistance, does not
concern us. One detail, however, is worth noticing. During the
iconoclast persecution a new popular art makes its appearance in and
about those remote monasteries that were the strongholds of the mystics.
Of this art the Chloudof Psalter is the most famous example. Certainly
the art of the Chloudof Psalter is not great. A desire to be
illustrative generally mars both the drawing and the design. It mars,
but does not utterly ruin; in many of the drawings something significant
persists. There is, however, always too much realism and too much
literature. But neither the realism nor the literature is derived from
classical models. The work is essentially original. It is also
essentially popular. Indeed, it is something of a party pamphlet; and in
one place we see the Emperor and his cabinet doing duty as a conclave of
the damned. It would be easy to overrate the artistic value of the
Chloudof Psalter, but as a document it is of the highest importance,
because it brings out clearly the opposition between the official art of
the iconoclasts that leaned on the Hellenistic tradition and borrowed
bluntly from Bagdad, and the vital art that drew its inspiration from
the Christian movement and transmuted all its borrowing into something
new. Side by side with this live art of the Christian movement we shall
see a continuous output of work based on the imitation of classical
models. Those coarse and dreary objects that crop up more or less
frequently in early Byzantine, Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian,
Romanesque, and early Italian art, are not, however, an inheritance from