A third distinctive mark may be found in the ornaments, and especially in the capitals; in point of execution there is not much difference, but the design in Theodoric’s time is much inferior. The artists no longer endeavoured to imitate the antique, but introduced badly imagined fancies of their own. Theodoric was educated at Constantinople, and probably procured his artists from that city. At a later period we know the church of St. Mark at Venice to have been built under the direction of a Greek architect, and though an interval of several centuries occurred between these erections, we yet observe many points of resemblance; and may reasonably consider some of these peculiarities to arise from the Greek school of art in the later ages. We meet occasionally in other places with traces of the employment of Greek artists, quite enough to shew, that though they combined with the western and northern nations in the degradation of architecture, each nation however, following a road in some degree peculiar to itself, yet that they had nothing to do with the new, and very different style, which arose out of that degradation, and which we now call Gothic. There was little good architecture out of Rome, at least in Italy: there is an arch at Rimini which is attributed to Augustus, and probably with justice, though the inscription on which it principally depends does not seem to occupy its original situation; and we see at Ancona an arch dedicated to Trajan. The latter is of simple form and pleasing proportion, but the details of both are bad.