hue, from which rays of light diverge. A violet tunic and mantle enclose his vast frame and with hands dis proportionately small and defective, he gives the blessing and holds on his shoulder the pastoral staff. A short co pious beard parted in the centre and brushed down over the cheeks, thick hair parted in the middle and falling in wiry lines behind the back inclose a face careworn, aged and grim. The eyebrows are semicircles, the nose straight; and a reminiscence of the regular classic forms is preserved, but the mosaist accuses the degeneracy of the times, and his attempt to express majesty betrays the feebleness of his power. 1 The two angels that bend reverently at each side of him, the prophets and apostles in double rows of six advancing towards him with crowns are diminutive when compared to him. The symbols of the evangelists high up on the gold ground, a cross above the Saviour’s head and in the lower course two figures of S. Peter and S. Paul complete the ornament of the arch, wich in consequence of the fire of 1823 retains but little of its original colour. Four fragments of mosaics representing animals in fine movements and in good style, are preserved in a room adjacent to the sacristy of S. Paolo and may serve to give a faint idea of the original ornaments of the external front of the basilica, wdiilst three colossal heads of apostles, in the same place in a later style may be useful hereafter to illustrate a foreign Greek or Byzantine element in the art of Italy in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Had the mosaics of the great aisle been preserved, they would have been of much interest to the critic as showing how the Sa viour’s miracles and the lives of the saints and churchmen were represented. Almost a century elapses between the period which witnessed the adornment of S. Paolo and that which produced the mosaics of S.S. Cosmo and Da- miano, 2 yet as regards the spirit in which the apsis and 1 This figure has been very much [ ing the time that Felix IV lh was restored. ! Pope of Rome, between 526 and 2 This church was erected dur- I 30. The period which intervenes