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THE ORIGIN OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. 77
Every tyro in the history of art is aware that up to
the thirteenth or fourteenth century—the era of
Cima-bue, Giotto, Van Eyck, &c.—the art of Europe was
almost exclusively in the hands of a few wandering
Greeks; the little that was done in painting,
sculpture, and architecture was done by them. Cimabue,
Giotto, and their contemporaries, copied the Greek
artists, with their gilded backgrounds and Guy Fawkes
attitudes, and other Byzantine absurdities and
beginnings of beauty. The original gilded mosaic ceiling of
the St. Sophia, now covered with whitewash, and
falling in fragments upon the thick bed of pigeons’
dung on the floor,* may be taken as the prototype of
the painting and mosaics of that period; and the
architecture of the mosque is as obviously the prototype of
everything in both Saxon and Norman architecture,
excepting the nave and its ship-shaped adjuncts: the
pointed arch and doorway being but a transverse
section of a boat or ship, keel uppermost.
The early Christian missionaries adopted the dates
and many of the ceremonies of pagan festivities, as well
as the forms and symbols of their worship, but gave
* Pigeons are cultivated in the vicinity of all the mosques. When
I visited the St. Sophia, the pigeons were flying about the interior, and
some of the galleries were yielding beneath the weight of the
pigeons-dung deposited upon them. I picked up a handful of fragments of
mosaic that had fallen from the ceiling. They are pieces of glass
gilded or silvered on the face, and with a thin layer of glass over the
leaf of gold or silver. The figures of some of the seraphims were
distinguishable in spite of the whitewash, and are precisely in the
style of the specimens of Byzantine art in the gallery of Florence,
which are so obviously the sources of Cimabue’s earliest inspirations.
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