man, condemned to keep
His cave of punishment.
His was the frequent scream
Which when far off the prowling jackal heard,
He howled in terror back.
For from his shoulders grew
Two snakes of monster size
Which ever at his head
Aimed their rapacious teeth.
He, in eternal conflict, oft would seize
Their swelling necks, and in his giant grasp
Bruise them, and rend their flesh with bloody nails
And howl for agony,
Feeling the pangs he gave, for of himself
Co-sentient and inseparable parts
The snaky torturers grew."[64]
Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer.
Next the man giving the branch to the sphinx must shadow the reconciliation of man with God, and the hippogriffs the final redemption of man. The hippogriff is a combination of horse and eagle. The horse, as St. Dionysius says, was symbol of evangelical resignation and submission; if white, it sheds divine light. The eagle, he tells us, is a high and regal bird, potent, keen, sober and agile; the winged horse consequently stands for man's upward flight to heaven through submission to God. In the fifth frieze, the Christian virtues of strength, fortitude, sobriety, and obedience are symbolized by bulls and horses.
Fresco in the Spanish Chapel, S. Maria Novella, Florence.
See Page 77, note.
Around the door are sculptures of the same kind of emblems with vines entwining—which teach that all manly strength must be used for Christ.
In the central portion are more friezes, all symbolizing the struggle between good and evil; the war between angels and demons; between man's earthly nature and his heavenly soul.
Here are men fighting dragons, and struggling with serpents; winged angels riding on heavenly horses; and over the door the grand central idea, St. Michael triumphant over the dragon-serpent, the favourite hero and great example of those days.
On the other side of the church we seem to get the symbolism of the New Testament. Here, mixed still with the dragons and hippogriffs of the time, we can see the Virgin with the Divine Child at her breast.
On the capitals of the north door, round the corner, are the entirely Christian emblems of the man, the lamb, a winged eagle, and two doves pecking at a vase, in which are heavenly flowers. In the lunette, Christ is giving to St. Paul on one side a roll of parchment, and on the other hand entrusting the keys to St. Peter; under it are the words: Ordino Rex istos super omnia Regna Magistros.
The capitals in the church are carved with similar subjects; one has the emblems of the evangelists; another Adam and Eve with the tree of knowledge on one side, and a figure offering a lamb on the other. On one are griffins at the corners, and Longobards with long vests, beard, and long hair, crouching between them; on another, a virgin martyr bearing the palm. The fourth column on the left has a curious scene of a man dying, and an angel and a demon fighting for his soul, which has come out of him in the form of a nude child. Two pilasters show the sacrifice of Isaac, and Daniel in the lions' den.
Door of the Church of San Michele, Pavia.
So we see, that mediæval as he was at that time, the Comacine Master of the seventh and eighth centuries, even though his execution were low, had a high meaning in his work. As to the rudeness of the handling, there is this to be said. We see the work after more than a thousand years' exposure to the atmosphere, and the sculptures are not in durable marble, but in sandstone, which has a habit of getting its edges decayed, so we may fairly suppose the cutting looked clearer when the ornamentations were fresh. The form of both animals and men is, however, and naturally always was, entirely mediæval, which seems synonymous with clumsy.
The use of marble ceased for some centuries with the fall of the Roman Empire. Theodosius had made a law, forbidding any one below the rank of a senator to erect a building of marble, or valuable macigna; thus the Christian buildings after the fifth century were generally of humble sandstone; and this continued till the time of St. Nilus, who tells his friend that "in arenaria he may effigy every kind of animal, which will be a delightful spectacle" (dilettoso spettacolo di veduta). It was a stone peculiarly adapted to building, as it was easily cut, and yielded to all the imaginations of the sculptor with very little labour. I have given an especially lengthy description of the façade of S. Michele, because it embodies all the special marks of the ornamentation of the Comacine under the Longobardic era. The church of S. Fedele at Como is another instance; here, too, the capitals of the columns, and the holy water vase, which is held up by a dragon, are full of orphic symbolism. The left door has an architrave with obtuse angles bearing a chimerical figure, half human, half serpent—the gnostic symbol of Wisdom. Serpents and dragons entwine on the lintels, and emblematize the Church's power to overcome.
In studying the scrolls and geometrical decoration of the Comacines, one immediately perceives that the intreccio, or interlaced work, is one of their special marks. I think it would be difficult to find any church or sacred edifice, or even altar of the Comacine work under the Longobards, which is not signed, as it were, by some curious interlaced knot or meander, formed of a single tortuous line.
As far as I can find from my own observations, there is this difference between the Byzantine and Comacine mazes; the Byzantine worked for effect, to get a surface well covered. His knots and scrolls are beautifully finished and clearly cut with geometrical precision, but the line is not continuous; it is a pretty pattern repeated over and over, but has no suggestion of meaning.
The Comacine, on the contrary, believed in his mystic knot; to him it was, as I have said, a sign of the inscrutable and infinite ways of God, whose nature is unity. The traditional name of these interlacings among Italians is "Solomon's knot."
I have seen a tiny ancient Lombard church, in the mountains of the Apuan Alps, built before the tenth century, of large blocks of stone, fitted and dovetailed into each other with a precision almost Etruscan. High up in the northern wall is a single carved stone some three feet long, representing a rude interlaced knot.[65] We asked a peasant what it was.
"Oh, it's an ancient girigogolo," said he, by which I presume he meant hieroglyphic.
On going to a higher fount and asking the priest, we got the information that it was a "Solomon's knot," and that such intrecci were found on nearly all the very ancient churches. He supposed it had some meaning—and thought it expressed eternity, as the knots had no end and no beginning. The Italian philologist, Sebastian Ciampi, gives these interlacings a very ancient origin. "We may observe," he writes, "in the sculpture of the so-called barbarous ages on capitals, or carved stones, that they used to engrave serpents interlaced with curious convolutions. On the wall too they sculptured that labyrinth of line which is believed to be the Gordian knot, and other similar ornaments to which Italians give the generic name of meandri. I do not think that all these representations were merely adapted for ornament, but that they had some mystic meaning. I am not prepared to say whether our forefathers received such emblems from the Northern people who so frequently peregrinated in Italy, or from the Asiatic countries. This is certain, the use of such ornamentation is extremely antique, and we find it adopted by the Persians, and see it in Turkish money, and carpets, and other works of Oriental art."[66] Ciampi goes on to find the root of these emblems, both the Runic knot and the Comacine intreccio, in the Cabirus of the ancient Orientals. It is possible