The curious union of two utterly different styles is well exemplified in another of the miniatures in the last mentioned _Psalter_. Here David is represented like a Byzantine Emperor crowned and wearing the richly embroidered _toga picta_, and holding an open book. The figure might well pass for a representation of the Emperor Justinian, and the original painting was probably of that date, of the early part of the sixth century.
On each side of the Byzantine David is a female figure draped with most gracefully designed folds of pure Graeco-Roman style, a most striking contrast to the central figure. Who these ladies represented in the original manuscript it is impossible to say, but the painter who in the tenth century illuminated the _Psalter_ called them _Wisdom_ and _Prophecy_, writing by them the names _Sophia_ and _Prophetia_.
[Illustration: Fig. 5. The Prophet Ezechiel from a Byzantine manuscript of the ninth century A.D.]
Many other examples might be given to show that a truer notion of classical illuminated manuscripts of the best Graeco-Roman style can be gained from a study of the works of mediaeval copyists than from manuscripts which, though older, are of late and debased style like the famous illuminated Virgil of the Vatican[28].
After Rome had ceased to be the seat of government, Constantinople became the chief centre for the production of illuminated manuscripts[29], but nevertheless the older classical style of drawing to some extent did survive in Italy, though in a very debased form, down to the thirteenth century, when Cimabue and his pupil Giotto inaugurated the brilliant Renaissance of Italian painting.
The _Gospels_, for example, which St Augustine is said to have brought with him to Britain in 597 A.D., have paintings, enthroned figures of the Evangelists, which in design and colour are purely of late Roman style, unchanged by the then wide-spread influence of Byzantine art.
The history of the origin, development and decay of the Byzantine style in manuscripts, as in other branches of art, is a long and strange one[30]. The origin of the Byzantine style dates from the time when Christianity had become the State religion, and when Constantine transferred the Capital of the World from Rome to Byzantium.