In the first centuries Anno Domini, painting was wholly proscribed by Christendom.  Its technique did not differ from that of antiquity; but Christendom took up an attitude of antagonism.  The picture worship of the old religions was opposed to its very origin and essence, and was only gradually introduced into the Christian cult through heathen influences.  It is a fact too, easy to explain, especially through its Jewish origin, that Christianity at first felt no need of art, and that this one-sidedness only ceased when the specifically Jewish element in it had died out, and Christendom passed to cultivated Greeks and Romans.  In the cemeteries and catacombs of the first three centuries, we find purely decorative work, light vines with Cupids, but also remains of landscapes; for instance, in the oldest part of the cemetery of Domitilla at Rome, where the ceiling decoration consists of shepherds, fishers, and biblical scenes.  The ceiling picture in St Lucina (second century) has apparently the Good Shepherd in the middle, and round it alternate pictures of Him and of the praying Madonna; whilst in the middle it has also charming divisions with fields, branches with leaves and flowers, birds, masks, and floating genii.

In Byzantine painting too, the influence of antiquity was still visible, especially in a Psaltery with a Commentary and fourteen large pictures.  David appears here as a shepherd; a beautiful woman’s form, exhibiting the melody, is leaning with her left arm upon his shoulder; a nymph’s head peeps out of the foliage; and in front we have Bethlehem, and the mountain god resting in a bold position under a rock; sheep, goats, and water are close by, and a landscape with classic buildings, streams, and mountains forms the background; it is very poetically conceived.  Elsewhere, too, personifications recur, in which classic beauty is still visible, mixed with severe Christian forms.

At the end of the tenth century began the Romantic period, which closed in the thirteenth.

The brilliant progress made by architecture paved the way for the other arts; minds trained in its laws began to look for law in organic Nature too, and were no longer content with the old uncertain and arbitrary shapes.  But as no independent feeling for Nature, in the widest sense of the term, existed, mediaeval art treated her, not according to her own laws, but to those of architecture.  With the development of the Gothic style, from the thirteenth century on, art became a citizen’s craft, a branch of industry.  Heretofore it had possessed but one means of expression—­religious festival or ceremony, severely ecclesiastical.  This limit was now removed.  The artist lived a wide life, open to impressions from Nature, his imagination fed by poetry with new ideas and feelings, and constantly stimulated by the love of pleasure, which was so vehement among all classes that it turned every civil and ecclesiastical event to histrionic purposes, and even made its influence felt upon the clergy.  The strong religious feeling which pervaded the Middle Ages still ruled, and even rose to greater enthusiasm, in accordance with the spirit of the day; but it was no longer a matter of blind submission of the will, but of conscious acceptance.