After architecture, miniature drawing alone sustained the chief honor of art through a long course of centuries; and, without it, the history of painting could not be written. Born in the disastrous days of barbaric irruptions, miniature grew up within the shadow of the cloister, and contained within itself the germs of all the magnificence which the pencil of Italy finally produced. Enamored of solitude and contemplative life, the graphic industry of monks employed the darkest period of human history in preserving the precious fragments of the classics, while it adorned itself with the charms of liturgical poetry, and the wealth of biblical truth. Usually the same individual was at once a chronicler of pious legends, a transcriber of antique manuscripts, and a miniaturist, and his glowing lines were not more significant than the little pictures which gemmed the page. Above each vignette he was wont to wreathe a crown of flowers, that his written words might find an echo in the graces of his pencil; and the latter was a better interpreter of the author's heart than the barbarous idioms then spoken. The Idyl, the Eclogue, and the Epic, called forth all the power and graces of this refined art; and if Allighieri, in the Divina Commedia, records with honor the two great fathers of Italian painting, Cimabue and Giotto, he has not omitted the two most celebrated miniaturists of his age, Oderigi da Gubbio, and Franco of Bologna. This association of extremes was a proper one, since the ideas of large compositions lay inclosed in the smallest illuminations, like unfolded flowers, each shrined in its delicate bud. Glass-painting sprang into existence simultaneously with miniature in the dark ages; and these inseparable companions were subjected to the same vicissitudes, and shared one common fate. The former was cultivated in Italy as early as the eighth century, as may be seen in the treatise on this subject and mosaic, published by Muratori; also in the work of the monk Theophilus, who flourished in the ninth century. Like miniature, it constituted the delight of the cloister for many an age, during which the cultivators of these twin-born arts produced many glorious monuments of their genius, when both species closed their career east of the Alps with Fra Eustachio of Florence. Perugino, Ghiberti, Donatello, and other artists of the highest order, frequently furnished designs at a later period; but in preparing and coloring glass, the Italians were greatly excelled by more western races. The fifteenth century was the most luminous period of the art; in that which succeeded, it reached its perfection on the Atlantic shore and died.