capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north
had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions,
as happened elsewhere in Europe. You have read how the Romans had to
withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks
of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles,
Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization.
A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy
a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to
the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture. But next to
Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for
the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the
city. In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, and
continued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, till
the Turks conquered them in 1453. The Byzantines were wealthy and made
exquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory. While they were
painting better than any other people in Europe, they too reproduced
the same subjects and the same figures over and over again, only the
figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian, English,
and French artists, who in varying degrees at different times tried
to paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite the
same success. So long as there was no need for an artist to paint
anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people
desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there was
little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what
was not wanted. But in the thirteenth century a great change took place.

Let us here refresh our memories of what we may have read of that
delightful saint, Francis of Assisi. He was born in 1182, the son of
a well-to-do nobleman, in the little town of Assisi in Umbria, and
as a lad became inflamed with the ideal of the religious life. But