This and other subsequent paintings of the Crucifixion treat the subject in a very conventional way, and it is not till about the thirteenth century that we find the Death of Christ represented with anything like realism. In the _Gospels_ of the Priest Rabula, Christ is represented crowned with gold, not with thorns; He wears a long tunic of Imperial purple reaching to the feet. The arms are stretched out horizontally, an impossible attitude for a crucified person, and four nails are represented piercing the hands and both feet separately. _Oriental influence._ It appears to have been the gloomy Oriental influence that gradually introduced scenes of martyrdom, with horrors of every description into Christian art, which originally had been imbued with a far healthier and more cheerful spirit, a survival from the wholesome classical treatment of death and the grave. Hell with its revolting horrors and hideous demons was an invention of a still later and intellectually more degraded period. _MSS. of the Gospels._ _Evangeliaria or manuscripts of the Gospels._ One of the most important classes of Byzantine manuscripts, and the one of which the most magnificent examples now exist are the _Books of the Gospels_ already mentioned at page 46 as being occasionally, either wholly or in part, written in letters of gold on leaves of purple-dyed vellum. _The four Evangelists._ These Imperially magnificent manuscripts are usually decorated with five full page paintings, placed at the beginning of the codex. These five pictures represent the four Evangelists, each enthroned like a Byzantine Emperor under an arched canopy supported on Corinthian columns of marble or porphyry. Each Evangelist sits holding in his hand the manuscript of his _Gospel_; or, in some cases, he is represented writing it. In the earlier manuscripts, St John is correctly represented as an aged white-bearded man, but in later times St John was always depicted as a beardless youth, even in illuminations which represent him writing his Gospel in the Island of Patmos, as at the beginning of the fifteenth century _Books of Hours_. Next comes the fifth miniature representing "Christ in Majesty," usually enthroned within an oval or vesica-shaped aureole; He sits on a rainbow, and at His feet is a globe to represent the earth, or in some cases a small figure of _Tellus_ or Atlas with the same symbolical meaning. _The Canons of Eusebius._ _Sasanian style._