Long after the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Byzantine style of painting survived; and even at the present day the monks of Mt Athos execute large wall paintings, which, as far as their style is concerned, might appear to be the work of many centuries ago. M. Didron found the monastic painters in one of the Mount Athos monasteries using a treatise called the [Greek: Hermêneia tês zôgraphikês], in which directions are given how every figure and subject is to be treated, and which describes the old traditional forms without any perceptible modification[32]. The proportions of the human form are laid down after the characteristic slender Byzantine models, the complete body, for example, being nine heads in height. _5th century MS. of Genesis._ _Weak drawing._ The earliest Byzantine manuscript which is now known to exist is a fragment of the _Book of Genesis_, now in the Imperial library of Vienna, which dates from the latter part of the fifth century. This fragment consists of twenty-four leaves of purple-dyed vellum, illuminated with miniatures on both sides. In the main the designs are feeble in composition and weak in drawing, belonging rather to the latest decadence of Roman classical art than to the yet undeveloped Byzantine style, which was soon to grow into great artistic spirit and strong decorative power, a completely new birth of aesthetic conceptions, the brilliance of which is the more striking from its following so closely on the degraded, lifeless, worn-out art of the Western Empire. In this manuscript of _Genesis_ there is but little promise of the Renaissance that was so near at hand. The drawing of each figure, though sometimes graceful in pose, is rather weak, and the painter has hardly aimed at anything like real composition; his figures merely stand in long rows, with little or nothing to group them together. Fig. 6 shows examples of two of the best miniatures, representing the story of the accusation of Joseph by Potiphar's wife. In every way this _Genesis_ manuscript forms a striking contrast to the delicate beauty and strongly decorative feeling which are to be seen in a work of but a few years later, the famous _Dioscorides_ of the Princess Juliana. _The Dioscorides of c. 500_ A.D. Among all the existing Byzantine manuscripts perhaps the most important for its remarkable beauty as well as its early date is this Greek _codex_[33] of Dioscorides' work on _Botany_, which is now in the Imperial library in Vienna[34], No. 5 in the Catalogue. The date of this manuscript can be fixed to about the year 500 A.D. by the record which it contains of its having been written and illuminated for the Princess Juliana Anicia, the daughter of Flavius Anicius Olybrius who was Emperor for part of the year 472, and his wife Galla Placidia: Juliana Anicia died in 527. [Illustration: Fig. 6. Miniature from the Vienna manuscript of _Genesis_.]