I do not know whether any one, in discussing this matter, has drawn attention to so small a detail as a certain checkered border of disconcerting similarity in the two series. Therefore I, who am nothing of an expert in these questions, will pass it by. But I cannot pass Kahrieh Jami by without pointing out, from the depth of my inexpertness, how unlikely it was that Theodore Metochites, the lover of all things Greek, should send, at the end of the thirteenth century, for one of those hated Latins who had just been driven out of Constantinople, to decorate the church they had left a ruin. Even if it should be proved that the designer of these mosaics was an Italian, however, or that he had watched Giotto in the house of the Scrovegni, it would not alter the fact that the trend of influence was all the other way. Constantinople had for the young Italian cities, down to 1453, an immense artistic prestige. Indeed, the church of the Salute, recalling as it does the lines of a mosque, seems to suggest that in Venice, at least, this influence did not cease with the coming of the Turks. Greek masters of mosaic were invited time and again to decorate Italian interiors. The primitive Italian painters drew Byzantine madonnas on gold backgrounds exactly like mosaicists working in a new—and possibly a cheaper—medium. Giotto himself, like his master Cimabue, made pictures with little cubes of coloured glass. I will not say that the Italians, in turn, never influenced the Greeks; the very name of Constantinople is proof to the contrary. Least of all will I say that Italy had only one source of inspiration. But I will say that there is room to revise our ideas of the Renaissance. Most that has been written about the Renaissance has been written without any first-hand knowledge of Byzantine art, and in the romantic view that the Renaissance was a miraculous reflowering of the classic spirit after a sleep of centuries. Need it dim the glamour of the Renaissance to look upon it as something less of an immaculate conception? If the Renaissance was a reflowering, it was of a plant that had silently grown in another soil. And Kahrieh Jami is the last flower of that plant in its own Byzantine ground. * * * * *