The flowering of European painting and sculpture, known to us as the Renaissance, emerged somewhat improbably from artistic traditions which had survived over the preceding centuries. After the Fall of Rome (c.450 CE) the continent of Europe had witnessed four centuries of cultural and artistic stagnation, known as the Dark Ages, during which most of the Classical painting and colour techniques had lapsed into disuse if not obscurity. Only in Ireland, Iona and Northern England - where early Christian monasteries produced a series of magnificent illuminated manuscripts (550-800 CE) - and in Asia Minor - where the decorative painting skills of Byzantine art flourished - were the Greek and Roman methods of colour production maintained, and sometimes enhanced. As European fine art slowly began to recover from 800 CE onwards, in the paintings, illuminations and architecture of the Carolingian and Ottonian courts, the Roman Church instigated - through its own network of abbeys in France and Germany - a program of building works which culminated in the glorious series of (first) Romanesque and (then) Gothic cathedrals. The following International Gothic style of art was in fact the milieu in which Giotto launched the proto-Renaissance with his naturalistic Scrovegni Chapel frescoes at Padua.