VISUAL ARTS 83

Western visual art that have been mentioned; but the most extraordinary
episode of the three was the triumph of an Hellenic remnant over the
native genius of the West in the province of Sculpture in the Round;
for, in this field of artistic endeavour, the thirteenth-century Northern
French exponents of an original Western style had produced master-
pieces that could look in the face those of the Hellenic, Egyptiac, and
Mahayanian Buddhist schools at their zeniths, whereas in the field of
Painting, by the time when a revenant Hellenic style invaded it, Western
artists had not yet shaken off the tutelage of the more precocious art of a
sister Orthodox Christian Society, while in the field of Architecture
the Romanesque style—which, as its latter-day label indicates, was a
nascent Western World's variation on an architectural theme inherited
from the latest age of an antecedent Hellenic Civilization—had already
been overwhelmed by an intrusive 'Gothic* style which, contrary to the
implication of its misnomer, had originated, not among the barbarians
in a no-rnan's-land beyond the European limes of the Roman Empire, but
in a Syriac World which, in articulo mortis, had made a cultural con-
quest of the savage Western Christian military conquerors who had seized
upon fragments of a dissolving 'Abbasid and a dissolving Andalusian
Umayyad Caliphate.

For a twentieth-century Londoner's enlightenment the combatants in
a mortal struggle between a doubly defeated native Western visual art
and its alien Syriac and Hellenic assailants were still standing, turned to
stone in the postures of the last act in their encounter, in the archi-
tecture and sculpture of the chapel (aedificatum A.D. 1503-19) that had
been built on to Westminster Abbey under the auspices of King Henry
VII of England (rcgnabat A.D. 1485-1509). In the vaulting of the roof the
* Gothic* style had achieved a tour deforce which, though manifestly its
neplus ultra, was a chef-d'oeuvre capable of still holding at bay the waxing
Hellenic invader who was now treading so importunately on a waning
Syriac invader's heels. In the host of erect stone figures in excelsis, which
declared in dumb-show morituri te salutamm as they gazed down at an
Italian Hellenomime's trinity of recumbent bronze figures on the tombs
below,1 a Transalpine school of native Western Christian sculpture was
singing a silent swan-song between frozen lips. The centre of the stage
was held by the Hellenizing masterpieces of a Torrigiani (vwebat A.D.
1472-1522) who—contemptuously ignoring the uncouth milieu in which
he had deigned to execute his own competently polished work for the
sake of the lucrative profits to be earned from a royal patron in$artibu$
Barbarorum—was looking round him complacently in the confident
expectation that, in saecula saeculorum, these fruits of a Florentine
master's voluntary exile would be the cynosure of every Transalpine
sight-seer's eyes.*

1 The contrast between these respective products of a surviving Transalpine native
Western school and a contemporary Hellenizing Italian school of sculpture in Henry
VII's Chapel catne out dramatically when, after the War of A.D. IQ39-45. the pensive
English-carved figures usually marooned at Westminster up aloft were placed on exhibi-
tion at the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington on a level with the
spectator's eye and face to face with Torrigiani's accomplished gilt angels. t

3 'This man had a splendid person and a most arrogant spirit, with the air of a great
soldier more than of a sculptor, especially in... his vehement gestures and his resonant