The whole of the designs, in composition and drawing and in the costumes of the figures, are those of the fourth century. The details are coarse, the attitudes devoid of spirit, and the figures clumsy. The backgrounds are painted in and the colouring is dull in tone and heavy in texture, put in with a considerable body of pigment (_impasto_). Gold, not in leaf but as a fluid pigment, is largely used for high lights on trees, mountains, roofs of buildings, and for the folds of drapery, especially where the stuff is red or purple. The male figures have flesh of a reddish-brown tint like many of the Pompeian wall paintings; they wear short tunics with cloaks thrown over the shoulders. Other figures wear a long _dalmatica_ or tunic, ornamented with two vertical purple stripes, closely resembling the tunics which have recently been found in such abundance in the late Roman tombs of the Fayoum in Upper Egypt. _Period of decadence._ On the whole the miniatures are neither graceful nor highly decorative; they were executed at about the low water mark of classical artistic decadence shortly before the Byzantine revival under Justinian. Much that has been written in their praise must be attributed to antiquarian enthusiasm rather than to just criticism[24]. [Illustration: Fig. 2. Miniature of classical design from a twelfth century _Psalter_ in the Vatican library.] Before passing on to another class of manuscripts it should be noted that there is in existence one manuscript of the fourth or fifth century A.D. which is of special interest on account of its being ornamented, not only with miniature pictures, but also with some decorative designs of a stiff conventional character. This is a Roman _Kalendar_, which forms part of a manuscript in the Imperial library in Vienna. The ornaments have but little decorative merit, but they are of interest as showing that the illuminations in classical manuscripts were not always confined to the subject pictures. _Copies of lost originals._ It has not as a rule been sufficiently noticed that the style of miniature paintings in manuscripts of a considerably earlier date than either the Ambrosian _Iliad_ or the Vatican Virgil is very fairly represented in various manuscripts of the tenth to the twelfth century, the illuminators of which have evidently copied, as accurately as they were able, miniatures in manuscripts of the first or second century A.D. The originals of these early Roman manuscripts do not now exist, and therefore the information as to their style and composition, which is given in the mediaeval copies, is of great interest. _Classical design._ _Graeco-Roman design._