To express these new emotions the old painting was inadequate. Italy through the so-called Dark Ages produced art abundantly. Wherever power and order asserted themselves amid the welter of war and oppression, stately buildings rose and these were decorated. Thus at Rome, where the popes gradually added temporal to spiritual power, splendid basilicas grew over the tombs of the martyrs. At Ravenna, through the 6th and 7th centuries the seat of the Byzantine and Gothic sovereignties, magnificent churches and baptistries were covered with pictorial mosaics. In Sicily, at Messina, Cefalù and Palermo, the sway of the Norman kings in the eleventh and twelfth centuries expressed itself in churches and civic buildings of the utmost splendor, which were adorned with mosaics by Greek masters. When the fugitives from the valleys of the Po, Adige, and Piave, and Brenta fled from Attila to the Venetian fens, there again was a beginning of great building. Wherever there was a powerful primate as at Milan, Como, Parma, Pisa, or a wide ruling abbot as at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, Capua, you will find art. But hardly, except perhaps in architecture, Italian art. We have sporadic provincial expressions dominated from afar by the prestige of the Eastern Roman Empire. At Constantinople there was a permanent court, a ceremonious civilization, an artistic blending of the traditions of old Greece and of the mysterious Levant. The merchants of the world sought from Byzantium, jewelry, enamels, embroideries, brocades, carved ivories, and pictured manuscripts. She was to the early Middle Ages what Paris is to ours—the æsthetic fashion maker of the world,—and her skilled artists went far afield as so many missionaries of the Byzantine style. We find them making the mosaics of Ravenna in the 6th and 7th centuries, of St. Mark’s at Venice from the 9th century, of many Roman churches from an even earlier date, of Palermo in the 12th, and of the Baptistry at Florence in the 13th. This Byzantine manner, as practiced by the travelling Greek artists and by their innumerable Italian imitators, is the real starting point and jump-off place for Italian painting. Hence in first studying the Byzantine style we do but imitate the Italian painters who immediately preceded Giotto. [Illustration: FIG. 1. Byzantine Narrative Style about 1300. Detail from Mosaic Book Covers in the Opera del Duomo. ] [Illustration: FIG. 2. Mosaic in the Cathedral, Pisa. St. John, left, is by Cimabue, 1302; the Christ is in good Byzantine tradition; the Virgin, right, is some twenty years later. ]