It has been already stated that the earliest recorded miniature painter was a lady named Lala of Cyzicus in the days of Augustus Cæsar, days when Cyzicus was to Rome what Brussels is to Paris, or Brighton to London. All her work, as far as we know, has perished. It was portraiture on ivory, probably much the same as we see in the miniature portraiture of the present day. But this was not illumination. The kind of painting employed in the two Vatican Vergils was, however, something approaching it. These two precious volumes contain relics of Pagan art, but it is the very art which was the basis and prototype of so-called Christian art of those earliest examples found in the catacombs and in the first liturgical books of Christian times. The more ancient of the two Vergils referred to, No. 3225, which Labarte (2nd ed., ii. 158) thinks to be a century older than the other, Sir M.D. Wyatt considered as containing "some of the best and most interesting specimens of ancient painting which have come down to us. The design is free and the colours applied with good effect, the whole presenting classical art in the period of decline, but before its final debasement." Whereas in the second MS., No. 3867, the style, though still classical, is greatly debased, and probably, in addition to this, by no means among the best work of its time. It is described as rough, inaccurate, and harsh. The method is of the kind called _gouache_, _i.e._ the colours are applied thickly in successive couches or layers, probably by means of white of egg diluted with fig-tree sap, and finished in the high lights with touches of gold (Palæograph. Soc., pl. 114, 117). This finishing with touches of gold brings the work within the range of illumination. There is, indeed, wanting the additional ornamentation of the initial letter which would bring it fully into the class of mediæval work; but, such as it is, it may fairly claim to be suggestive of the future art. Indeed, certain points in the MS. 3225--viz. that Zeus is always red and Venus fair, that certain costumes and colours of drapery are specially appropriated--would lead to the supposition that even then there existed a code of rules like those of the Byzantine Guide, and that therefore the art owed its origin to the Greeks.