which gave him back for a time the best part of the lost western half of the empire, or the codification of Roman law with which his name has become most familiarly associated in later history. Truth will not allow us to think that this work was executed solely for the glory of God. Very significant of the spirit in which all its splendour was produced is Justinian's famous explanation in comtemplation of it: "I have beaten thee, Solomon."[1]
While in its peculiar glory of construction St. Sophia was never followed by subsequent builders, there is a church at Salonica that appears to be an imitation of it, and from the period of Justinian the Latin basilica form declines and we have churches with domes, plain exterior walls, and rich interior decoration of gold 'surfaces, mosaics, frescoes, and elaborate capitals—the best known of which is St. Mark's at Venice. Earlier Byzantine work is illustrated in the West at Ravenna and in Sicily. It is the prevalent style of Greek church architecture.
Manuscripts now began to imitate the architectural decorative style. The Laurentian monastery at Florence contains a Syriac MS. executed as early as a.d. 586, with beautiful Byzantine decorations on nearly every page.
At the same time sculpture declined. There were statues of emperors and bas-reliefs of religious scenes in the earlier period, but sculpture was rarely if ever used in the East for statues of Christ, the Virgin, or saints. This is a point in which the Eastern Church differs from the Western, where statuary is a marked feature of church decoration and comes into close connection with worship. There are no statues in Eastern churches. The iconoclastic dispute to which our attention will next be directed, though commonly described as concerned with "image worship," refers to pictures, the only kind of images worshipped in the Greek part of Christendom. There never was any Church decree to forbid the use of solid images. It appears to have been by a sort of tacit
- ↑ Νενίκηκα σε Σολομών.
