But there were two considerations that affected this natural love of art in the Gauls: the Roman element in them, and the fact that art, like literature, was becoming a matter of form. Just as beauty of style had once been a living and inspiring thing to the Greeks, but became in our period a juggling with phrase and rule, so art had lost its true and inner meaning. And just as the Greek influence of Massilia had encouraged the artistic instinct of the Gauls, so the harder Roman spirit proved an impediment. Sidonius illustrates this fact admirably. Surrounded by all the luxury of his time, he felt bound to include art products among his possessions, and liked to talk about them, with the comfortable assurance that it was a respectable and cultured thing to do. But he shows little real appreciation. Purgold has shown[1286] that most of the descriptions in his poems referring to art are borrowed from Claudian and other Roman poets. In his account of the castle of Pontius Leontius we have a list of artistic productions[1287] in the usual Roman encyclopaedic style, and similarly his acquaintance with sculpture is merely conventional. He knows the stock attitudes that sculptors give to philosophers,[1288] and this is the order of his artistic attainments. In describing the churches of Patiens at Lyons[1289] and of Perpetuus at Tours,[1290] he is much more interested in the inscriptions[1291] he wrote for them than in the architecture. And this in spite of the fact that Perpetuus had employed a style in rebuilding the church at Tours in 470 which was new to Gaul, and had introduced a form of choir which was the point of departure from which the ‘chevet’ of French, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture developed.[1292] This lack of appreciation was part of the general decline in art at this time. In the triumphal arch of Constantine (early fourth century) part of the design is inserted from the arch of Trajan, and has, therefore, little original artistic value, while the other part, which is contemporary, illustrates the decay of aesthetic taste. Similarly, the contemporary part of the discus of Theodosius is merely profuse and conventional.[1293]