over with the King of England (Richard), and who had built a portion of the wall "from gate to gate": evidently Magister Filipus from the English Masonic Lodge, fraternized and worked with his brethren of the Roman and Eastern Lodges.
Again, on p. 21, Procopius speaks of a town or village now known as Eufratisia, but which was once called Comagene, because there were Romans as well as Persians living there. Romans, of course, meant subjects of the Italian Empire, but the name Comagene is certainly suggestive of those Italians being the Comacine builders who made the castles. Then Procopius's description of the rebuilding of the church of Santa Sofia is, to say the least of it, interesting to a student of Lombard architecture. The passage translated runs thus—"The church then (Sta Sofia) being thus burned, was, at that time, entirely ruined. But Justinian, a long while after, rebuilt it in such a form that if any one in older times could have foreseen it, he would have prayed God that the old church might be completely destroyed, so that it may be rebuilt as it now is. Therefore the Emperor sent to call artificers and masters, as many as there were in all the universal world. And Anthemius Trallianus, the head architect, was a great machinist, learned in all kinds of machinery, not only that of his own time, but in all that the ancients knew, and he had the power to regulate and organize perfectly the working of all things necessary to building, and to the ordering and executing of his own designs and inventions. And Isidore, another Milesian, was also a master of machinery. The church then, was so marvellously made that it was a beautiful thing to see; it seems supernatural to those who behold it with their own eyes, and incredible to those who only hear of it, because it is so high that it seems to touch the sky.... The face of the church looks towards the rising sun, but where the secret offices to God are performed, it is built in this manner. It is a half-round edifice which those of this profession call Hemiciclo, which is to say half a circle ... and in this there are columns planted beneath its floor." Here we have a decided Basilica with raised tribune and semi-circular apse; both the form and nomenclature seem to have been imported as a new thing from Italy. "The golden dome appears suspended from heaven, so light are the columns supporting it that it seems to be in the air.... One can never arrive at understanding how it was built (apprendere l' arteficio), but one goes away astonished at one's inability to enough admire such a work."
Does not this seem an argument for the universality of the Masonic Brotherhood, even in Byzantine days? Here are certainly Italian artists, Italian basilican forms, and Italian nomenclature, among the Greeks working at Sta Sofia. And here too are Lombard galleries and windows with an Eastern touch added. Which way did the influence come? Was this the origin of that characteristic Eastern mark of the Lombard style in Italy?—or was it an importation from Italy to Byzantium, where Procopius at least seems duly astonished by it? It is a question for experts to solve. There is much for the archæologist to do yet in finding the true pedigree of architecture.
CHAPTER IV
COMACINE ORNAMENTATION IN THE LOMBARD ERA
The Comacine Masters were distinctly sculptor-architects, and their ornamentation was an essential part of their buildings. Yet, to them, sculpture was by no means mere ornament. It was not a mere breaking up of a plain surface, as a beautifying effect; nor a setting of statues and niches for symmetry. It was an eloquent part of a primitive language of religion and art. The very smallest tracery had a meaning; every leaf, every rudely carved animal spoke in mystic language of some great truth in religion. But it was a language as yet artistically unformed, because the mediæval man had more articles of creed than he could express in words, and his hand like his mind was as yet unpractised.
Thus it came that, as we have said, the Comacine Masters were much given to symbolism.
The old Italian writers class this symbolism under two heads—the ermetica (hermeneutic?), which they define as symbolism of form or number; and orfica (orphic), that of figures or representations. Under the first head would fall the symbolical plan of their churches to which we have referred; the form of the windows, which were double-lighted, and emblematized the two lights of the law and the gospel; the rounded apse, emblem of the head of Christ; the threefold nave shadowing forth the Trinity; the octagonal form of the baptisteries, which St. Ambrose[57] says was emblematical of the mystic number 8, etc.
Under the head of orphic would come all those mystic signs of circle and triangle; of sacred monograms, and the mysterious Solomon's knot;—that intricate and endless variety of the single unbroken line of unity,—emblem of the manifold ways of the power of the one God who has neither beginning nor end. It would also include all the curious possible and impossible animals that abound in the Comacine work of earlier Longobardic times; all the emblematic figures of angels and saints; and the figurative Bible stories of the later Masters.
It has been said by Ruskin that the queer monsters sculptured on the early Longobard churches, such as Sant' Agostino at Milan, San Fedele at Como, and San Michele at Pavia, were the savage imaginings of the lately civilized Longobards, as seen through the medium of the sculptors employed by them. This is, however, proved not to be the case; animal symbolism was in those days an outward sign of Christianity, which, in a time when there was no literature, was to the unlettered masses a mystical religion represented to their minds in signs and parables. Christ Himself used this parabolic style of teaching. And it was even more than that,—it was a sign of an older Bible lore among the Hebrews, and other ancient peoples. As in many early Christian ceremonies in the West (i.e. in Europe) we can trace the remains of the old Latin paganism, so in the East we may trace signs of the older Hebrew faith.
Speaking of the Longobardic mixtures of labyrinths, chimeræ, dragons, lions, and a hundred other things, which at first sight do not seem to be connected with Christianity, Marchese Ricci asks—"If these queer mixtures were only the effect of the architects' caprice, whence came the first impulse to such caprice? Not from classic Rome certainly. Not from the Goths and Longobards, because they being barbarians had to employ Italian artists."[58] The theory propounded by Pietro Selvatico, in an article in the Rivista Europea, is suggestive of a reply to this question. He supposes that the Byzantines originally took their symbolism from the Hebrews, and from the traditions of Solomon's Temple, which are also shared by the Phœnicians;[59] and that this animal symbolism changed its character in the East, owing to the restrictions imposed by the Emperor Leo and his successors, but that in freer Italy it still flourished. It is difficult to say whether the Comacines took their ornamentation direct from the Byzantines at Ravenna in the early centuries after Christ, or whether they got it by longer tradition, from that same Eastern source from which the Byzantines took theirs. It is true that Como had more than one bishop who was a Greek,[60] and that when it fell under the government of the Patriarch of Aquileja, the Comacines were employed by him in Venice, Grado, and Torcello, etc., where they would have seen a good deal of Byzantine work; but their earliest employment at Torcello was in the seventh century, and we have seen them using their chisels for Theodolinda long before that time.
The Byzantine ornamentation became conventional after 726 A.D., when the Emperor Leo III. (the Isaurian) promulgated his iconoclastic edict in the Eastern Empire. Some Greeks had begun to feel that, under the appearance of Christianity, they were only keeping up the ancient paganism. They were taunted by the Hebrews and Mussulmen, who, inspired by the Koran, had a great hatred of images. This sect found a champion in Leo III., who had lived much among the Arabs, and shared their prejudices against idols. He convoked a council, prohibited images, and proscribed all reverence and use of them either public or private. A figure of the Christ over his own palace fell the first victim to his iconoclastic destruction. Several Greeks who would not bow to this decree fled to Italy, and put themselves under the protection of Pope Gregory II. From this time the eastern Byzantine architectural ornamentation was entirely confined to linear and geometric design, and vegetable forms. In pure Byzantine work one sees no dragons or fighting monsters, only conventional doves and scrolls. The sculptors took to imitating woven stuffs, and Oriental patterns in marble, and to twining their capitals with conventional leaves, but the life had gone out of their work; it was all set and precise, but dead.
The