The first sign of actual contact with Byzantium is in the early part of the ninth century, when certain pictures produced in Carolingian MSS. show that the painters had been made aware of the existence of similar Byzantine work. And that is actually all that can be referred to as direct imitation of Byzantine art. The magnificent early examples of chrysography on purple vellum were not Byzantine but Eastern-Roman, and the Roman traditions of the Eastern capital lingered on into the ninth century, having begun to grow weaker at the end of the sixth. Italy was nearer and more potent in its influence upon barbaric art than Byzantium, and there was little difference in book-decoration between East Rome and West Rome till after the time of Justinian; so far as the cultivation of the arts was concerned. Consequently there is no need to look to Byzantium as having supplied models for the rest of Europe to follow. There is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between the _livres de luxe_ of the two Roman empires, and those of the new nations which began {61}with Irish work about A.D. 600, and ended with Italian and French work about 1550. The former were books written in gold, perhaps; perhaps decorated with red ink only; illustrated, maybe, with a picture or with pictures. The latter were books of which the principal characteristic was not their bookishness but their decorativeness. A set scheme of ornament sustained from beginning to end, with due proportion in the intervals, in which even the pictorial designs were subordinate to the decorative plan, constituted the value of the illuminated books of the European middle ages.