We would not assert that these works, pompously enumerated by Anastasius, the Librarian, corresponded in purity and elevation of style with the richness of the materials employed; for we know, on the contrary, that in order to comply with the wishes of the powerful emperor, artists were found who, by simple substitution of heads, attributes, or inscriptions, converted without any scruple a Jupiter into God the Father, or a Venus into a Virgin. The large cities were not as yet depopulated of the innumerable crowd of statues which adorned them; and it was only in provinces far from the metropolis that the images of the false gods were buried under the fragments of their overthrown temples (Figs. 272 and 273). In fact, before the art had adopted, or rather created, the system of Christian symbolism, it was absolutely necessary to borrow the elements of its existence from the glorious materials of the past, and even to imitate the works of Pagan art. In Greece more than elsewhere--and by Greece we include Constantinople--statuary preserved, under Constantino and his earliest successors, a certain degree of power which we might call original. The design still adhered to beautiful forms, and, in the arrangement of subjects, the principles of the ancients were for a long time applied, as if instinctively. Although artists no longer studied nature, they were, at all events, surrounded by excellent models, which guided them with somewhat imperious rule. [Illustration: Fig. 273.--Altar of Jupiter Ceraunus (Gallo-Roman Sculpture), discovered in 1711, under the Choir of Notre-Dame, Paris.] We have already seen that, among the barbaric chiefs who invaded the empire of the Cæsars and seated themselves on the Imperial throne of Rome, were some who, at a certain period, professed to be, if not the protectors of the Fine Arts, which had then sunk into torpor, at least the preservers of the Greek and Roman monuments belonging to the noblest epoch of Art. The statues were no longer broken down; the inscriptions and bas-reliefs ceased to be mutilated; the triumphal arches (Fig. 274), the palaces, and the theatres, were respected, or, rather, were left standing. But a kind of deadness had come over the artistic world, and a few sympathetic manifestations of this kind were not sufficient to reanimate its enervated spirit; it was necessary that the period of repose should be fully accomplished--a period which, in the views of Providence, was perhaps a phase of profound contemplation or preparatory development.