nor unnatural. Yet that art still continued to exist in this the most unhappy and troubled time of the papacy, is proved not merely by one example which shall be no ticed, but by the fact that, when Gregory the seventh res tored some of its power to the church, the arts reappeared, maintaining after the lapse of more than a hundred years the character and the peculiarities for which they had been remarkable in the period immediately preceding their ap parent disappearance. To the Benedictines accrued in some measure the merit of having preserved the traditions of art; and in one of their churches, in the neighbourhood of Rome, the works and, for the first time, the names of Roman artists are preserved. To the North of the Capital and about seven miles from Nepi, on the road to Civita Castellana lies the castle and the Benedictine church of Sant Elia, the latter an edifice of very old Christian form, and covered internally with wall paintings' by two brothers Johannes and Stephanus and their nephew Nicolaus of Rome. The exact period in which these artists executed the internal decorations of S. Elia cannot be ascertained; but they were men who combined the imitation of forms and compositions, cha racteristic of various ages of Roman art, with a technical execution which can only be traced as far back as the tenth century. Their work, though it has suffered from the ravages of time, illustrates a phase hitherto compara tively unknown. They seem to have been men accustomed to mosaics, for they mapped out their colours so as to resemble that species of work. They used, not the thin water-colour of the early catacomb painters at Rome or Naples, but the body-colour of the later artists, who painted the Christ of the chapell of S. Cecilia in S. Ca- listo and the figures of Curtius and Desiderius in the catacomb of S. Januarius. On a rough surface of plaster they laid in the flesh tones of an uniform yellowish co lour, above which coarse dark outlines marked the forms, red tones the half tints and blue the shadows. The lights
