Christian art began in the catacombs. Under ground, by the feeble light of lanterns, upon the ceilings of crypts, or in the semicircular spaces left above some of the more conspicuous graves, the first Christian pictures were painted. Imperfect in design, exhibiting often the influence of pagan models, often displaying haste of performance and poverty of means, confined for the most part within a limited circle of ideas, and now faded in color, changed by damp, broken by rude treatment, sometimes blackened by the smoke of lamps,--they still give abundant evidence of the feeling and the spirit which animated those who painted them, a feeling and spirit which unhappily have too seldom found expression in the so-called religious Art of later times. Few of them are of much worth in a purely artistic view. The paintings of the catacombs are rarely to be compared, in point of beauty, with the pictures from Pompeii,-- although some of them at least were contemporary works. The artistic skill which created them is of a lower order. But their interest arises mainly from the sentiment which they imperfectly embody, and their chief value is in the light which they throw upon early Christian faith and religious doctrine. They were designed not so much for the delight of the eye and the gratification of the fancy, as for stimulating affectionate imaginations, and affording lessons, easily understood, of faith, hope, and love. They were to give consolation in sorrow, and to suggest sources of strength in trial. "The Art of the first three centuries is entirely subordinate,-- restrained partly by persecution and poverty, partly by a high spirituality, which cared more about preaching than painting." With the uncertain means afforded by the internal character of these mural pictures, or by their position in the catacombs, it is impossible to fix with definiteness the period at which the Christians began to ornament the walls of their burial-places. It was probably, however, as early as the beginning of the second century; and the greater number of the most important pictures which have thus far been discovered within the subterranean cemeteries were probably executed before Christianity had become the established religion of the empire. After that time the decline in painting, as in faith, was rapid; formality took the place of simplicity; and in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries the native fire of Art sank, till nothing was left of it but a few dying embers, which the workmen from the East, who brought in the stiff conventionalisms of Byzantine Art, were unfit and unable to rekindle.