The interval during which the change was going on, could not be otherwise than hurtful to those arts; and accordingly, the first efforts of Christian painting, as far as we see in the few relics we possess, were gross and coarse. Yet there is in them a certain dignity of expression, which saves them from contempt. But the revival of art in Christian times belongs rather to the Greeks than the Italians, as I shall have occasion to point out; for as the conquest of Greece by Rome brought art and artists into Italy, so the removal of the seat of government attracted them eastward again, to the new court, and they left the deserted Capitol of the Western Empire to seek the patronage of the rising city. From what I have said in this Essay, it will be seen that the time when Italy could boast of native artists, equal to those of the surrounding nations, was before Rome existed. That after the Roman conquests, native artists gradually disappeared, and the very few who have left a name seem only placed here and there as beacons, to show the nakedness of the land. That the forced luxury of art, fostered by imported pictures and statues, foreign artists and imperial patronage, produced in Italy no painter or sculptor of eminence, even in the most flourishing times of Roman politeness; while the free cities of Greece had given birth to those men of sublime genius, whose borrowed works gave to Rome all the lustre she could ever boast of in art[69]. FOOTNOTES: [33] I am aware that it is unusual to place Italy before Greece in any ancient historical question; but I am induced to do this because the real ancient Italian art, namely that of the Etruscans, was coeval with the oldest Greek schools, if not anterior to them; and that as the Roman conquests destroyed the arts of old Italy before the most brilliant periods of Greek painting, I may well look upon Italian or Etruscan painting as having an earlier life and death than that of Greece. [34] Micali, Vol. II., p. 73. [35] Micali, Vol. I., p. 32, mentions certain books of the ancient Italians, preserved at Anagni, so late as the time of Fronto. [36] For whatever notices of ancient or modern authors, before his own time, that can throw lustre on Etruscan art, I must refer to Tiraboschi, _Storia delle Lettere Italiane_, Parte Prima, x. to xviii., and to Micali’s work generally. [37] It is a pity that the want of early Italian writers deprives us of the means of judging of the truth of some of the marvellous traditional accounts of Etruscan monuments. The cavern sepulchres of Clusium may possibly have been connected with the labyrinth which Pliny, B. xxxvi., c. 13, on the authority of Varro, says, was under that incomprehensible tomb of Porsenna, the account of which reads like a fairy tale; and has uselessly employed some modern dreamers in impossible restorations.