Ajanta: The Colour and Monochrome Reproductions of the Ajanta Frescoes Based on Photography v1.c4: Introduction
Ajanta: The Colour and Monochrome Reproductions of the Ajanta Frescoes Based on Photography v1.c4
- Language
- English
Introduction
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WHEN first I was honoured by the invitation to write these introductory words, my impulse was to decline. For I have never seen Ajanta. Great as has been my desire for many years to visit those famous cave-temples, with their frescoes and their sculptures, fortune has denied me the opportunity. How, then, could I be justified in attempting to write an introduction to such an important work as this?
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But, though I urged all the reasons that a natural diffidence prompted, Mr. Yazdani persisted in his request. The invitation was expressed in such gracious terms that refusal became impossible. It was true that I had never seen the originals of the paintings here reproduced for the first time in colours by photography: but it was also true that I had given many years of study to Asiatic painting in general; and as these frescoes are not only of supreme interest in themselves, but are of capital importance in their relation to the whole body of Buddhist painting in all the countries of Asia, I have tried on this account to justify my acceptance of the task.
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I
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The longer one studies the art of the world, the more one prizes, the more one returns to—or so at least is my experience—the art which, whether ostensibly religious or not, expresses or is impregnated with the life of the spirit. A landscape, a group of figures, a painting of flower or tree or animal, may serve for such expression, may move us more deeply than pictures or statues which profess to communicate great ideas. None the less, as we look back over the world's art, are we not longest held and most surely satisfied by those forms which the imagination of a race has assembled to embody the drama of human destiny, the agonies and triumphs of the human soul, and to which the genius of great artists has given embodiment? In such images, such far-descended shapes of myth and symbol, creative design discovers a stimulus and scope far transcending the private reactions of a single mind.
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Of such is the art of Ajanta. And I rejoice, as will all lovers of art, that this publication has been made possible by the enlightened munificence of His Exalted Highness the Nizam. For though the previous sets of copies had admirable qualities of their own, they were necessarily translations. After studying the plates of this volume, I see Ajanta with new eyes.
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Let us first consider the general effect of the paintings. (I am obliged to write of the impression made by the reproductions; no doubt this impression would be enriched and intensified by sight of the originals.) The interior of the *vihāra* to which the present volume is devoted, as we see it in Plate IV, shows us the disposition of the paintings on the walls and the ceiling, and reveals also the injury of Time and such defacement as has been caused by hands of men. All the lower portions of the frescoes have perished.
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One of the latest writers on Indian painting, M. Ivan Stchoukine, though his book¹ is not directly concerned with ancient art, has some illuminating pages on Ajanta. Incidentally, he mentions some words of mine, written many years ago, in order to record his disagreement.
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¹ *La Peinture Indienne à l'époque des Grands Mogols.* Paris, 1929.
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Coming from the study of Chinese art, I had once said that the compositions of the Ajanta painters seemed to me ‘crowded and incoherent’ and their art ‘primitive’, as compared with Chinese art, in spite of the ‘forcible and imposing impression’ they create and ‘the grace, dignity, and character’ of single groups and forms. M. Stchoukine quoted from the first edition of my *Painting in the Far East*, published in 1908: had he turned to the third edition, published in 1923, he would have found that further study of the copies available (actual photographs were not then to be procured) had induced a deeper appreciation, though I imagine he would still disagree with the judgement that ‘the composition is often turbid, and we are left with a sense of splendid struggle rather than of serene mastery’.
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M. Stchoukine’s own view must be quoted, and I venture to translate his words.
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Contemplating the frescoes (he says), one has at first the impression that the numerous figures represented in them are arranged—or piled up rather, so great is their number in proportion to the space—without preparatory thought or any preconceived plan, in a manner so natural that it appears almost accidental. A closer study soon reveals the learned design which controls their grouping. In their anxiety to present a picture full of natural effect, the artists of Ajanta take care to avoid all methods of composing where the governing idea is too obvious, such as those which exhibit the primitive device of a strongly marked symmetry or else immobilize the design by depriving it of movement and life. All their compositions are, on the contrary, based on complex arrangements, where the variety of the attitudes and of the groupings appears inexhaustible. But this abundance of forms is far from producing chaotic design, opposed to all idea of unity; used with art, it helps to create well-planned compositions, the unity of which is not impaired by the fact that it is made up of heterogeneous elements.
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I am glad to quote these words of a critic who is certainly not given to vague enthusiasm but, on the contrary, has not only acute perception but closely reasoned judgement. And I am very willing to admit that I may have emphasized too much the ‘abundance of forms’ without perceiving sufficiently their underlying coherence.
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At any rate I freely acknowledge that the more the frescoes are contemplated the more does one appreciate the subtle relationships that connect the groups of figures, so that though the ‘unity’ of the compositions is not what impresses the eye at first—rather, in many cases at least, the reverse—one comes in the end to recognize that profound conceptions can dispense with the formulas of calculated surface-arrangement and have their own occult means of knitting together forms in apparent diffusion. The unity attained is not so much like the decorative unity we are accustomed to expect in works of pictorial art, as like the deep congruity we find in nature, the continuity of relation between the hills and the trees and the flowers, the shadows and the light: it satisfies in the same large and silent way. For this art is characteristically Indian in its love of natural profusion: it desires the whole fullness of life. And this fullness is not merely the vigorous assertion of human vitality, it is not complete without the life of animals and plants. Man is seen in the midst of nature, not using her as something vanquished and subservient to his needs and pleasures, but emerging among those kindred forms of life as the most eloquent form she has created. The more the mind steeps itself in this art, the more it is aware of the profound conception of the unity of all life which pervades it.
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At the present day, obeying a reaction from the kind of art which is engrossed in problems of
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representation, we lay all the emphasis on design. Design is the root of the matter, assuredly: yet there is a danger in the too conscious pursuit of design. When the whole attention is concentrated on this, there is apt to be loss of depth. The artists of Ajanta had before them always the primary aim of rendering the significance of the stories they were to paint upon the walls. It was rather their intuitive unconscious powers which guided the disposition of the figures and synthesized their grouping. Thus the design is not altogether on the surface, but an underlying vitality within. I would not be thought to make any hard distinction between conscious and subconscious effort. Every artist knows how subtly and inextricably these two co-operate. The painters of Ajanta were conscious artists, obviously; they were not working at random or covering a surface bit by bit without plan or preconception; but they gave easy play, as they went, to the natural animation of forms; they felt no compelling need to enforce cohesion by gestures and attitudes dictated by pictorial effect rather than inspired by the subtle relationships of living beings in company. They welcomed the grace of casual movement. And we note how in these paintings each of the figures is intent on what it is doing or possessed by what it is feeling. There is no turning toward the spectator for sympathy or attention.
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A former age, used to the emphasis of decorative unity and really pleased by a rhetorical convergence of gesturing arms and similar devices of composition, had little means of appreciating the looser and more hidden pattern of these frescoes.
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It is not merely a question of altered taste. To us, for whom the universe is indefinitely enlarged and deepened to a complexity beyond conception, the art which presents a self-contained and patently reasoned whole, with an imposed logic of construction, seems to reflect an inadequate apprehension of the living world. It represents a conquest, but from the very fact of being a conquest seems to shut out and ignore so much that lies beyond it and eludes it.
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II
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It is a vision of the living world that the artists of Ajanta present; the teeming earth, the springing plants, the birds, the deer, the elephants; crimson-pillared pavilions and porticoes; gateways and roofs of cities; and among all these the life of men and women and children, supple-limbed, gracious in gesture, freely moving, playful or pensive in mood; all earthly life in its laughter and its grief: but always emerging from it a life of the spirit prevails, the spirit that contemplates and is filled with compassion. Sometimes, as in the fresco reproduced on Plate VIb, this spiritual presence appears in the doorway of the house embodied in the Bhikshu, who comes like a messenger, and is welcomed by its inmates. But it is in the marvellous fresco reproduced on Plate XXIV that this vision of life attains its consummation.
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Here is the spirit of Renunciation: but the life of the spirit appears not as in scornful disgust with the sweet life of earth, opposed and denying; it emerges from that life embodied in the youthful form of a prince of noble birth and breeding, not wasted with asceticism but supple with latent vigour, though gentle in gesture; and he looks not on any single sight but the whole world is in his eyes, and with it an immense, an ineffable compassion. Grandly he emerges, detached yet not isolated from all those variously occupied forms around him; or, if isolated, isolated only in spirit.
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Here one may see in perfection the designing instinct of Ajanta’s art. The form of the Bodhisattva stands out from the living background yet remains in the warm pervasive atmosphere of the whole scene. There seems to be no deliberation in the disposition of the elements of the design; it is as if all were there by nature; the strong red square as of pillars and cross-pieces, which are said to be a convention for the ridges of hills, contrasts with the just-inclined form of the Bodhisattva, attended by his consort on one side and a vigilant guard on the other, and with the background of mingling curves and jutting angles, where the eye, losing itself at first, discovers by degrees one form and one detail after another; here it is the gleam of flesh where a woman leans among foliage on her lover’s shoulder, and a peacock is crying beside his mate, and, more obscure, a monkey plays intently. There, shapes of supernatural beings begin to appear, some floating through the air, others playing music on instruments; the relaxed posture of a woman reclining in her lover’s arms takes the eye among more shadowy forms. Human and divine are mingled; it is as if all were rooted in the rich soil of life; and contemplating the fresco one has something like the feeling produced by gazing into an intricate depth of flowering foliage, leaf behind leaf and bough behind bough, when, lingering till the fall of the dusk, one may see the colours of the blooms retire into themselves, yet still burn unequally with a kind of secret glow.
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The former copies of the frescoes hardly prepare one at all for the extraordinary beauty both of drawing and of colouring. Texture means so much; and here there is a sensitiveness—consider, for instance, the drawing of the Bodhisattva’s lifted hand holding the water-lily—which the most skilful copyist could never hope to render.
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I am told that the present reproductions do give in the main the truth of the colouring; and one may well believe it. The depth and vibration of colour are extraordinary: and I had never conceived from any of the former copies such moving passages of colour as, for instance in this fresco, the blue of the peafowl, deeply gleaming from sombre green, that foils and enhances the whole warm harmony with its smouldering reds, the red of rust and the red of wine.
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Yet, no doubt, one loses much from the reduction of scale. Look at another fresco, and compare Plate XXXI, which gives the whole composition, with the detail given on Plate XXXIII. This marvellous head is that of one of the two women in the lower left-hand corner of the design: but in the larger plate the identity is almost obscured. This example indicates how much we must allow for the reduction. In this head we can appreciate the masterly brushwork of the painter, its largeness, vivacity, and freedom.
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There is a kind of drawing which is the opposite of that kind which traces the contours of forms but tells us no more of them than the lines enclosing the coloured areas of a map. The moving brush, defining cheek, arm, or shoulder, persuades us also of the roundness of firm flesh; and more, it communicates not only solidity but the bloom, the quivering tissue of the skin, changing with the emotions that kindle in the blood. Such drawing we find in the art of Ajanta at its best: for even in this one ‘cave’ the paintings are not all by one hand or quite in the same style.
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Certainly the feeling for roundness and relief is strong in some of these artists. There are even, what is so unusual in Oriental painting, traces of modelling: and we note that high lights are sometimes rendered on the faces. Such appear on the brow, nose, and chin of the Bodhisattva (Plates XXIV and XXV) and on the face of the woman reproduced on Plate XXXIII. These lights have the appearance of having been sponged out when the painting was wet, after the manner practised by our water-colour painters; but this may be an erroneous impression.
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There are no cast shadows in the frescoes: and I believe it is true that in all the pictorial art of Asia cast shadows are never introduced except under the influence and after the example of European painting. But there is in some, if not all, of the frescoes an attempt to produce the illusion of depth and recession, aided by an inconsistent but not unsuccessful perspective in the architecture. See, for instance, the groups in the interiors of the two pavilions (Plate XX) and the detail from one of these scenes reproduced on Plate XXII; a detail in which one can study what is the abiding fascination of Ajanta, the extraordinary beauty of grouped, living, preoccupied forms, here immensely enhanced by the strong, upright lines of the pillars.
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III
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However tentative, this endeavour to realize or suggest the modelling of forms and the recession of objects in space is remarkable. And the problem is raised: does this endeavour represent something innate in the Indian genius, or is it something stimulated by foreign example? Apparently it dies out of Indian painting in later times. Coomaraswamy notes that at Ellora the remains of the later frescoes are much flatter than the earlier paintings. And this flatness is marked in the Rajput paintings, whether on walls or in miniatures.
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On the other hand, we find that in the Mughal school the European effects of atmosphere, relief, and chiaroscuro are readily assimilated. And Dr. Stella Kramrisch observes that in many Indian sculptures the forms seem to be struggling to emerge into the round and stand free from the reliefs to which conditions restricted them.
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It is worth noting that a system of modelling in two tones, derived almost certainly from Indian example, is found in certain (by no means all) of the ninth-century Buddhist paintings recovered by Sir Aurel Stein from Tun-huang (see, for instance, Pl. X of *The Thousand Buddhas*). But here, as also in some early Buddhist pictures in Japan, this system is on the way to becoming a decorative convention, no longer really understood. It was an element that Chinese and Japanese painting could not assimilate and ended by rejecting.
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There are, of course, writers who believe that the art of Ajanta is somehow derived from Hellenistic art; and this might be an explanation of the tendencies we have been noting. It is not impossible that Hellenistic paintings were known to the Indian artists, but we do not know what they were like. If the wall-paintings of the third century, apparently by an artist from Asia Minor, found at Miran in Central Asia by Sir Aurel Stein, were typical of provincial schools in the Eastern provinces of the late Roman empire, there was little there to inspire or stimulate. The Miran frescoes depict Buddhist scenes. The contours are heavy, the faces have full, prominent eyes like the portraits found in tombs in Egypt. I find no affinity here with the animated drawing or the physical types of Ajanta. But the presence of foreign types, due to the pilgrimage to India of Buddhists from Central Asia, outside the north-western border, in two paintings in this *vihāra* (Plates XXXVIII and XXXIX) indicates a certain amount of intercourse with foreign lands; hence there may have been acquaintance with finer examples of Hellenistic art, capable at least of stimulating.
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How this great school of Indian painting grew up we do not know. Probably, like all vigorous schools, it would be willing and eager to borrow from art outside itself what it could readily absorb and assimilate. But in these days we tease ourselves overmuch over the question of origins. The art of Ajanta is thoroughly Indian, whatever stimulus it may have got from without. This is what is really interesting, its special contribution to the art of the world.
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And perhaps, after all, the solution of the problem we have been discussing may be simply this, that Indian art, being the art of an Aryan race, has more natural affinity with the art of Europe than with that of China and Japan. I certainly feel that this is true of the paintings of Ajanta.
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IV
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More than one writer has remarked on the likeness of the Ajanta paintings to early Italian frescoes. I do not think that this is more than a general affinity, which would show at the same time several points of contrast. The empirical perspective common to much Oriental art and the medieval art of Europe, before the ‘scientific’ perspective of the Renaissance, based on independent study, supplanted it; a somewhat similar, though not identical, technical procedure; the representation of two or more successive episodes of a story in the same composition; the spontaneous invention; the religious inspiration; these are the main points of likeness.
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Let me dwell for a moment on a point of difference; the painting of the nude human form. The painting of the nude is very rare in the late medieval painting of Europe most akin to these Indian frescoes. But with the Renaissance it soon becomes the supreme medium of expression for painters as for sculptors. Were it not for the example of Greek scuplture, this cult of the nude form would probably never have arisen. But having discovered the infinite expressiveness of the body in its ‘naked glory’, the artists of Europe have made it their central study. Yet there has always been something which is inevitably a little artificial in this study, seeing that it has been pursued among people unused to dispense with clothing. It is not something suggested by the sights of everyday life. There is, indeed, something that a detached observer might find at once a little ludicrous and a little pathetic in the labours of the orthodox life class, with its rings of earnest students drawing from a model not occupied in some natural action but posed in an arrest of movement.
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To Italian painters of the Quattrocento, to Pollaiuolo and Signorelli, and, following them, the young Michelangelo, the naked body was a discovered romance. Their mental inheritance was totally different from that of the Greeks, for whom the perfect body had the sacredness of service severely devoted by discipline to the State. To them it was, if a symbol at all, a symbol of emancipation from the ascetic fear of, and disgust with, the body which the medieval centuries had implanted in the mind. But above all its beauty was strange and new.
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Especially in the nudes of Signorelli we feel this thrill of romantic strangeness in the naked forms of youth.
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Now turn to Ajanta. Here is the nude body in every attitude and movement. But the forms have not been studied apart and indoors, each for its own sake, to be fitted deliberately into a preconceived design. These are forms seen in the fields, on the highway, by the river bank; familiar from infancy, stored in the unconscious memory. To the Indian artist the unclothed human body is no rare sight, it is a part of his everyday surroundings. And, no doubt, this is a reason why the drawing of the body at Ajanta has such delightful ease and animation. The beautiful ways of the human body in its spontaneous gestures and poses—and, untrammelled by clothing, they are as beautiful as those of animals—are seized with a sure eye and hand. There is no foreshortening too bold for these artists to attempt, and it is done with a straightforward mastery, as if no hard problem were involved. The forms are lithe and active, but with no muscular development. There is a noticeable gentleness in their movements.
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When one recalls the frescoes to memory, it is the extraordinary grace and living quality of particular figures and groups which one remembers with most pleasure: the seated woman seen from behind, for instance (Pl. XI); the groups on Plates XIII, XVII, XXXVII, to name but a few.
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We have noted above the sympathetic drawing of animals and birds in the frescoes; a kind of drawing which seems to owe its particular quality not to acute observation from outside but to a deep sense of kinship with non-human life. No doubt the beliefs of Buddhism operated strongly here. According to the *Jātakas*, the Buddha had in previous existences been a deer, an elephant, a goose—who could tell what spirit might not be enclosed in any animal or bird one met?
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At the same time the interest, as in Europe, centres in humanity. There is none of that vision which comparatively early in Chinese art sees man set in the immense surroundings of nature, and swept along in the great stream of universal life. The landscape element is tentatively approached, hardly grasped at all. The ridges of hills are marked by what appears more like a sort of structure or scaffolding, sometimes used to divide one scene from another. And there is a very curious convention of representing broken ground as if it were the debris of masonry. Professor Strzygowski has noted that just the same convention occurs in mosaics at Ravenna.
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But in plants and flowers the painters show great interest. On the ceiling of Cave I are panels of decoration in which the motives are plants, fruits, flowers, and animals. Examples are given on Plate XXXIX. Plate XL also reproduces two panels of splendid animal painting; a group of deer, and a pair of bulls fighting, which it is interesting to compare with a famous drawing of the same subject by Tōba Sōjō, the great Japanese draughtsman of the twelfth century. Mr. Yazdani notices the beauty and truth of the rendering of foliage of particular trees, the areca-nut palm and the *aśoka* tree, in the Padmapāṇi fresco. And in the panels reproduced on Plate XXXIX we see actual Indian fruits and flowers of great variety combined with birds or human or fanciful animal forms. The fine decorative invention, drawing richly
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on the various profusion of nature, contrasts with the poverty of Greek art in this respect and makes one think of the inexhaustible floral design of China, to which Europe, from the seventeenth century onwards, is in so deep a debt. Yet the design itself is quite different from Chinese design: the rendering of leaf, flower, and fruit is more solid, the disposition more static. In China the same elements would become less material, a breath of wind would seem to move them, creating tender curves and letting in more air and space. Again, the affinities of Ajanta seem more with Europe than with the Far East.
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And yet in the art of Asia what a supreme and central position Ajanta holds! The grand Buddhist art of the T’ang dynasty in China was stimulated and influenced directly from the Indian art of Ajanta and, doubtless, other monuments, now destroyed, and not merely through the formulas of Gandhāra. The stream flows onwards through Corea to Japan. It is a great and fructifying stream, for it gives to the races of the Far East something which otherwise they would have lacked, but which they must unconsciously have desired or they could not have accepted and assimilated it so enthusiastically. The very landscape-painting and flower-painting of China and Japan are tinged and perfumed with Buddhist thought and the Buddhist ‘communion of life’. Whoever studies the art of China and Japan, at whatever point he begins, starts on a long road which will lead him ultimately to Ajanta.
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V
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It is a strange thing that nearly all the great religious art of the world is the work of races to whom this religion was foreign, not native, in its origin. To the painters of Europe, Christ and his apostles are figures whom they must picture with an effort of imagination, beings whose earthly life and natural surroundings were perfectly unknown to them; and, therefore, while clothing these sacred figures in garments of convention, the painters have set them in a background familiar to themselves, among peasants or townsfolk of their own time: the Arno Valley or the foothills of the Alps, the Franconian hills or green pastures of Flanders. It is not different with the Buddhist painters of China and Japan.
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The real aspect of Sakyamuni, the Indian landscape, Indian habits of life, are to them also unknown. And in painting the Buddha legend they, like the Italians and the Flemings, have fallen back on what they know themselves, and have painted (as we see in the banners found at Tun-huang) the episodes of the legend in Chinese guise, with Chinese types and Chinese dress. Unlike Christian art, however, Buddhist art of the Mahāyāna tradition gives but a small space to the legend. It concentrates rather on images of contemplation, images which the later developments of Mahāyāna Buddhism created and multiplied but which are foreign to the simplicity of the primitive faith. The greatest works of Buddhist painting in China, the frescoes of Wu Tao-tzŭ and his compeers and followers, have perished. But the masterpieces of Buddhist painting and sculpture in Japan are unsurpassed in the religious art of the world. ‘The Descent of Amida with Angels to Welcome the Souls of the Blessed’, ascribed to Eshin Sōzu, at Koya-san—to name one among many sublime creations—has the power to carry the spectator into its own atmosphere of inward and abounding radiance and serene movement as of music, though he be totally ignorant of the religious conceptions it embodies. These
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conceptions, with all their imagery and symbolism, are of Indian origin. It is often assumed that the Buddhist art of the Farther East derives from India only through Gandhāra, where Hellenistic formula was made to serve for the expression of Indian ideas. But though the hybrid art of Gandhāra has left its permanent traces, like a deposit, on the Buddhist art of China and Japan, especially in certain arrangements of drapery; yet it is indisputable, as I have already said, that in the greatest times of Buddhist art in China, when Chinese pilgrims journeyed to all the sacred sites and monuments in India and brought back images and drawings, a fresh contact with Indian art was made and a direct influence established. In the paintings brought back from Tun-huang by Sir Aurel Stein, those so precious documents for the history of Buddhist art in Asia, there are figures which do not recall Gandhāra at all, but which are directly reminiscent of Ajanta; and similar parallels can be adduced from sculpture.
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In the Buddhist art of the Far East, then, we have an art based on Indian painting and sculpture, but filtered through the imagination of another race, and transmuted, etherealized in the process.
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It is, perhaps, easier for a race to formulate its conceptions of the other world of the spirit by borrowing from outside, from the spiritual experience of a different race; for these already are removed, for it, from actuality and already belong to ‘another world’ than their own. But India is the home of religions, and we cannot conceive of her as borrowing in this sphere from other peoples.
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The images of the Bodhisattvas in the marvellous early Buddhist paintings of Japan are isolated forms, seen as if evoked by the intensity of contemplation from the night of profound brooding in the mind; they appear, glowing with their own inward light, gracious and majestic and alone. But the great Bodhisattva at Ajanta is not, like those later creations of the Farther East, remote and detached from the world; he is in the world, he is a man with consort and companions, with the animation of the woods and the fields, the sun and the shadows and the green earth around him; he is a ‘surpassing spirit’, yet a man among men and women. For religion here is not something apart, something to which humanity pays homage as to an essence outside itself; it is a conformation of the mind, it is something inhaled with the breath.
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LAURENCE BINYON
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the Roman world, and the most important events of the reign of Constantine are thus represented as the immediate consequences of his conversion. But the historian, who must be content with the evidence of the times, will not be easily persuaded that the zeal of Constantine was not stimulated by the hope of political advantage, or that the conversion of the empire was not the result of a long and gradual process of change.
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The conversion of Constantine is a subject which has been discussed with great warmth by the historians of the church, and it is not surprising that their opinions should be divided. The panegyrists of the emperor, who were eager to celebrate his piety and his zeal, have represented his conversion as a miraculous event, which was confirmed by the appearance of a cross in the sky, and by the victory which he obtained over his rival Maxentius. The critics, on the other hand, who are less disposed to believe in the supernatural, have sought to explain the conversion of Constantine by the influence of his mother Helena, or by the political necessity of securing the support of the Christians, who were already a powerful and influential body in the empire.
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It is probable that the truth lies between these two extremes, and that the conversion of Constantine was the result of a combination of motives, in which the influence of his mother, the political advantages of the Christian religion, and the genuine conviction of his own mind, all played a part. The character of Constantine was complex and contradictory, and it is not easy to determine the precise nature of his religious beliefs. He was a man of great ambition and of great ability, and he was always ready to adapt his conduct to the circumstances of the time.
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The conversion of Constantine was a turning point in the history of the Roman empire, and it had a profound influence on the development of the Christian church. The emperor, who had once been the persecutor of the Christians, became their protector and their patron, and he used his power to promote the interests of the church and to suppress the pagan religion. The conversion of Constantine was the beginning of a new era in the history of the world, and it is a subject which will continue to be discussed by historians for many years to come.