Nevertheless, although the art which gives life to marble and bronze--a high style of sculpture--was in a stationary or retrograde state, the lower kind, which we may call domestic, preserved some degree of activity. For instance, it was then the custom for great personages to send as presents diptychs of ivory, on the outer face of which were carved bas-reliefs recalling some memorable event. Monarchs, on their accession, were in the habit of conferring diptychs of this kind on the governors of provinces and bishops; and the latter, in order to testify to the good understanding existing between the civil and religious authorities, placed the diptych on the altar. A marriage, a baptism, or any success, gave occasion for the presentation of diptychs. For two centuries artists lived on nothing but this kind of work. It needed events of some very extraordinary character to cause the production of any monument of real sculpture. [Illustration: Fig. 274.--Restoration of a Roman Triumphal Arch, with its Bas-reliefs.] In the sixth century the cathedrals of Rome, Trèves, Metz, Lyons, Rhodez, Arles, Bourges, and the abbeys of St. Médard at Soissons, St. Ouen at Rouen, and St. Martin at Tours, are mentioned as remarkable; and yet the walls of these edifices were nothing but bare stone, without either ornament or sculpture. “To become living stones,” says M. J. Duseigneur, “they had to wait for another age. The whole of the ornamentation was exclusively applied to the altar and the baptismal font. The tombs even of great personages present the most primitive simplicity.” (Fig. 275.) Ancient Gaul, in spite of its disasters, still retained, in certain parts of its territory, men, or rather groups of men, in whose hearts the cultivation of Art still remained a living principle. This was the case in Provence, round the archbishops of Arles; in Austrasia (Metz), near the throne of Brunehaut; in Burgundy, at the court of King Gontran. Most of the works and even the names of these artists are now lost; but history has recorded the movement, which was, as it were, a happy link destined to abbreviate the solution of continuity in artistic tradition. [Illustration: Fig. 275.--A Stone Tomb, of one of the first Abbots of St. Germain-des-Prés, Paris.] At the time when Greek art, in its degenerate state, had sunk down into a department of mere goldsmith’s work, casting over Europe only a pale and feeble light; when artists, in representing sacred or profane subjects, contented themselves with simple medallions of bronze, gold, or silver, which were generally inserted in a shrine, or suspended on the walls; across the seas Byzantine art was springing into life; an art which blended Hellenic reminiscences with Christian sentiment.