economic and political support helped give rise to an extensive programme of patronage undertaken by the popes in the early ninth century, which found its finest expression in the chapel of San Zeno in the basilica of San Prassede. The native element in the artistic revival in Italy is evident in the first examples of 'proto-Romanesque' building, but Byzantine influences remained strong; the first church of St Mark's, built in Venice around 830, was modelled on the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.

In other areas of the western Mediterranean artistic development suffered greater vicissitudes. In Spain very little art survives from the Visigothic period apart from personal jewellery and such items as the magnificent votive crown of King Recceswinth found in a treasure hoard at Guarrazar near Toledo in 1859. More evidence of the persistence of Roman traditions comes from the kingdom of León, where a number of fine proto-Romanesque churches were built in the ninth century such as San Julián de los Prados near Oviedo and Santa Maria at Naranco. Elsewhere in northern Spain churches were built in the 'mozarabic' style with some use of oriental elements by refugees from Islamic persecution.

For all these glimmerings of promise the art of Christian Spain remained crude and provincial in comparison with the brilliant art and crafts produced in the Ummayad emirate to the south. Its greatest achievement, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, was begun in 785 and could accommodate 5,500 worshippers. In the early medieval Mediterranean the most sumptuous art was that produced in the prosperous lands of the Islamic world. Ironically it was also in the lands first conquered by the Arabs that late antique traditions survived most fully, as is shown by buildings such as the Great Mosque in Damascus, but art soon took a new non-naturalistic direction in conformity with the Koran's prohibition of images.

The Mediterranean on the Eve of a New Age

In some respects the Mediterranean area had by 900 reached the nadir of a decline under way since the Late Roman period. The sea had ceased to be the unifying channel of a vast cen-

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