Mediæval Italy exulted in art generally, and especially in painting; but it was of a type utterly unlike that which the ancients produced. The Greeks loved art because it enabled them to embody the images which were inspired by direct intercourse with earth's fairest forms, and they used it simply as the minister of nature, and of beauty. But the Italians were imbued with more celestial sympathies, and employed beauty and nature chiefly as the vehicles of spiritual sentiment and exalted aspirations. In the fifth century pictorial art was gradually Romanized in the hands of early Christianity, and became transformed as it was transmitted toward the West. Mount Athos and Constantinople, were, for many centuries, the great sources of artistic activity, which imparted to painting a peculiar style. Long after originality in literature had ceased in the East, and national life was there unknown, the creation of pictures faltered not, but they were dry and heavy, like the immobile Byzantine government, and served only to preserve the elements of noble art, while Christianity itself was laying the foundations for the future unity of Europe among the progressive races. Down to the tenth century, art was absolutely controlled by this frigid conventionalism, but great improvements supervened as soon as an appreciative race had been prepared. As the effete world beyond the Adriatic expired, the republic of Venice arose and inherited all that the superseded orient had preserved. In point of art, down to the thirteenth century, she may be considered almost exclusively a Byzantine colony, inasmuch as her painters adhered entirely to the hereditary models. But as Byzantium had condemned all the higher forms of plastic art, Venice could derive no assistance from that source, and, consequently, her sculpture bore an entirely new phase. The Venetian mosaics, especially, we may regard as the most legible record of the great transition and new creation which at this era transpired. As early as the year 882, large works in this compound style, in a church at Murano, represented Christ with the Virgin, between saints and archangels. With incomparably greater originality and force is this new type represented in the church of St. Mark, founded A.D. 976, the earliest mural pictures of which date back at least to the eleventh, perhaps even to the tenth century.