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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 Italian architect, not being under the power of the edict of Leo, continued to carve his mythic animals, his symbolic birds and fishes, and even tried his hand at the first rude revival of the human figure in sculpture. His figures were disproportionate and mediæval in form,—what could one expect from a man of the Middle Ages just reawakening to the conception of art?—but they were full of fire and life. Their mystic beasts were horrible as any nightmare could conceive them; they were indeed conceived in the darkness of that night of superstition, ignorance, and fierce strife. Their angels were grotesque, not from want of imagination, but from want of models of form and proportion; their men are full of all kinds of expression, with their heads too large and their limbs too short; but their attitudes are lively, their faces grotesquely keen.

As a proof of this distinctive style, compare the Byzantine altar of S. Ambrogio at Milan, here illustrated, with the Comacine pulpit of the same church. (See page 88.)

Byzantine Altar in the Church of S. Ambrogio, Milan.

See page 74.

So many students of architecture roughly class as Byzantine every kind of intricate decorative work of the centuries before the Renaissance; but I think that, excepting in some instances in Venice and Ravenna (and not all the work of the era there), most of the Italian ornamental sculpture is Comacine, and not Byzantine. Certainly if you see a sly-faced lamb, or a placid lion with rolling eyes, peering out from beneath the abacus of a column, or a perky bird lifting up its claw over a vase, with an extremely lively expression of eagerness, that work is not Byzantine, though it may be surrounded and mixed with the most intricate possible weaving of lines or foliage. However, I leave the question of derivation of style to wiser students than myself, and return to the Comacine Masters and their symbolism.

It seems impossible that the Comacine sculptures on S. Michele could have come through the Byzantine. It is true they show rude and unskilled technical execution, but they have intense spirit, belief, life, and spontaneity. The Magistri must have got their ornamentation as they did their architecture from an older source,—and a traditional one. It came down like their Freemasonry from ancient Eastern builders through pagan Rome, and ages of mystic religions such as Gnostic and other deistic forms, till it became incorporated in Christianity. "We might," says Sacchi,[61] "define Christian symbolism as the representation of mysteries and religious truths by means of forms, cyphers, and determinate images." (La rappresentazione di dogmi, misteri e verità religiose, per mezzo di forme, cifre ed immagini determinate.)

An older and more authoritative testimony is given by Dionysius the Areopagite, the associate of St. Paul, by whom he was consecrated. In his De angelica seu celesti Hierarchia, Epistola ad Timotheum Ephæsiæ civitatis episcopum, he writes—"It is necessary to teach the mind as to the spiritual hierarchies, by means of material figures and formal compositions, so that by comparing the most sacred forms in our minds, we may raise before us the spiritual and unpictured beings and similitudes on high." As he says elsewhere, "ascendere per formas veritatim."

Again he writes to Titus—"Only by means of occult and difficult enigmas, is it given to the fathers of science to show forth mystic and divine truths."[62] In the second epistle to Timotheus, St. Dionysius writes—"We must raise ourselves from ascetic facts by means of imaginative forms, and we should not marvel as do the unknowing, if for this end are chosen many-footed beings, or creatures with many heads; if we figure bovine images, or lions, or eagles with curved beaks; flying creatures with three-fold wings, celestial irradiations, wheel-like forms, vario-tinted horses, the armed Sagittarius, and every kind of sacred and formal symbol which has come down to us by tradition." St. Nilus, too, writes to Olimpiodorus—"You ask me if I think it an honourable thing that you erect temples to the memory of martyrs as well as to that of the Redeemer—those martyrs who are certainly among the saints, and whose pains and sufferings have borne witness to the gospel. You also ask whether it would be wise to decorate the walls on the right and left with animal figures, so that we may see hares (conies) and goats, and every kind of beast flying away, while men and dogs follow them up. Whether it would be well to represent fish and fishermen throwing the line or the net; whether on the calcareous stone shall be well-carved effigies of all kinds of animals, and ornamental friezes and representations of birds, beasts, and serpents of divers generations?" St. Nilus says later that he quite agrees with all these things; so if the Fathers of the Church respected them, we need not heed Mr. Ruskin's diatribes.

St. Nilus lived in the time of John XVI., 985-996, nearly 900 years after Dionysius, but this extract from his letter shows that Christian symbolism had not altered in all those centuries, and the church he describes is no more or less than a Comacine church of that era. The chase is figured forth on the façades of S. Michele and S. Stefano at Pavia, and S. Zeno at Verona. The huntsman and his dogs are generally used as emblems of the faithful Christian driving out heresies.[63] The fisherman symbolizes the priesthood, fishing for souls out of the ocean of sin. There is a beautiful example of this myth in the fresco of the ship (the ark of the Church) on the roof of the Spanish chapel at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where the fisherman is casting his line from the bank.

Seen through the medium of these early lights, we no longer look on the façade of S. Michele as Ruskin does, as a sign of savage atrocity, but every line of the time-worn sculptured friezes stands out as full of meaning as an Egyptian hieroglyphic, to one who can interpret it. On the angle to the left we have the army of the Church militant, figured as armed soldiers, whose horses trample some quadrupeds underfoot: symbol—the vanquishing of sins. Above this a frieze of four animals—first, a lion; second, too much broken to be decipherable, but from the context it is probably a man-headed creature; third, a bull; fourth, a winged creature. Here we have the four beasts of the Apocalypse,—emblems of the Evangelists. "And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle" (Rev. iv. 7). The connection between the two friezes is evident. First, the Church militant clad in the whole armour of God, and the second emblematizing the shield of the Gospel.

In the next compartment of the façade, that on the left of the door, we have the chase of a deer and other animals flying from fierce dogs, which we have explained above; over this a frieze of vine-leaves. Here, again, the connection of thought is apparent. The vine figures Christ, the only true refuge from heresy.

High up on each side of this left door is a peacock with an olive-leaf in its claw-symbol of the Church bringing peace. In the centre between these is the bishop with his robes and pastoral staff—the visible dispenser of peace in the Church. On the fourth frieze, which is above the door, we go into the mythic animals: here is a hippogriff with the three-fold tail; a woman with six breasts, carrying two pine-cones; she is in a long robe with large sleeves, and veiled as an Egyptian; two sphinxes, on each of which a man rides, and whispers in their ears; a dragon with wings and bird's feet, on its neck a child; a priest with vase of holy water and an asperge, who is blessing some people; a man (Zohak) between two winged serpents which bite his head; a sphinx to whom a man presents a little branch of a tree; two hippogriffs, seated opposite each other with a man in the centre who places their claws on his head. A marvellous frieze indeed, and one which in spite of St. Dionysius speaks as much of Eastern traditions long before Christ, as of Christianity itself. The many-breasted woman with the pine-cones is the ancient mother goddess, Isis, Cybele, or Cupra, according to the age and clime; here I take it the old image is turned to new uses, and she figures Eve, the primitive mother. The two sphinxes are obscure, but they would seem to emblematize man wresting the secrets of knowledge of good and evil from the mystery of the unknown, as when Adam and Eve ate the apple; the dragon, always emblem of sin or the devil, ridden by a child, is a fine symbol of the child Christ, the seed of Eve, who should overcome sin. Then comes the purification by benediction, as shadowing Abel's accepted sacrifice, and the serpent-fanged remorse of Cain, as shown in Zohak.

"There where the narrowing chasm

Rose loftier in the hill

Stood Zohak, wretched 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.

See page 80.

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 that the ancient serpent worship of the Druids and other Northern nations, was in some way descended from the same root. In any case they were transmitted to the Longobardic Comacines through the early Christian Collegia of Rome, as we see by the plutei in San Clemente, S. Agnese, etc., and by the beautiful single-cord interweavings on the door of a chapel in S. Prassede.

Comacine Knot on a panel at S. Ambrogio, Milan. One strand forms the whole. From Cattaneo's "Architettura."

See page 83.

Sculpture from Sant' Abbondio, Como, 5th century. (The circle and centre a single strand.)

See page 84.

There is a marvellous knot sculptured on a marble panel of the ninth century from S. Ambrogio Milan, which Cattaneo has illustrated.[67] The whole square is filled with complicated interweavings of a single strand, forming intricate loops and circles, the spaces between which are filled with the Christian emblems, the rose, the lily, and the heart. Another pluteus, originally from San Marco dei Precipazi at Venice, but now over the altar at S. Giacomo, is dated 829 A.D., and is covered with what seems at first sight a geometric pattern of circles and diamonds, but if analyzed will be found a single strand interwoven in the most mysterious and beautiful manner. It seems that the parapet of the tribune in all these early Basilicas was the place chosen especially by the Roman architect of the third and fourth centuries, and the Comacine of the eighth and ninth, to set their secret and mysterious signs upon, and to mark their belief in God as showing infinity in unity.

It is very curious to notice in the churches which the guild restored in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when their tenets had altered, and their sign changed, how they themselves removed these old stones, but yet being careful not to destroy them, they turned them and sculptured them again on the other side. In the excavations or restorations in Rome many of the intrecci have come to light at the back of panels of Comatesque pulpits, recarved into altar frontals, or used as paving-stones before the altar.

Some of the earlier and less intricate forms of knots may be seen in the church of S. Abbondio at Como, which was built in the fifth century and again rebuilt in the ninth. Some excavations in the last century revealed the foundations of the fifth-century church, and also brought to light a number of sculptured stones which had been turned face downwards to form the pavement. We give illustrations from two of these which have the Comacine signs plainly written on them, and show even in this early and simple form the reverence for the line of unity. Cattaneo thinks they may have formed the front of the gallery above the nave in the eighth-century building.

In the museum of Verona is a precious fragment of Comacine work dating from Luitprand's time. It was a ciborium which Magister Ursus was commissioned to make for the church of S. Giorgio di Valpolicella. It is especially valuable as the first dated piece of sculpture of the Longobardic era, and the first signed specimen of Comacine interlaced work. The columns which remain support a round arch, covered with sculptured intrecci. As it stands now the two halves of the arch do not match, so it must be conjectured that the ciborium had four columns, and that the halves of the arch were originally on different sides of the erection. The intrecci are beautiful and varied, displaying the unbroken continuity of the curved line which marks the Comacine work of the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The capitals are curious in form and not at all classical. Beneath the capitals of the two columns are the following inscriptions in rough letters and dog Latin. One runs—"IN NOMINE DNI. IESU XRISTI DE DONIS SANCTI IUHANNES BAPTISTE. EDIFICATUS EST HANC CIVORIUM SUB TEMPORE DOMNO NOSTRO LIOPRANDO REGE, ET VB PATERNO DOMNICO EPESCOPO, ET COSTODES EIUS, VIDALIANO ET TANCOL, PRESBITERIS, ET REFOL GASTALDO, GONDELME INDIGNUS DIACONUS SCRIPSI." And the other—"URSUS MAGESTER CUM DISCEPOLIS SUIS, IVVINTINO ET IVVIANO EDIFICAVET HANC CIVORIUM, VERGONDUS TEODAL FOSCARI."[68]

The date of Bishop Dominic's death coincides with Luitprand's accession to the throne, so we may safely say Magister Ursus worked in 712. Ursus Magister fecit is also engraved in the same style on an ancient altar recently discovered in the abbey church of Ferentillo near Spoleto. It is known that Luitprand went to Spoleto in 739, and installed Hilderic in the Dukedom. In any case this inscription is of priceless value to our argument that the Comacine Guild which worked for the Lombard kings was really the same guild that built the latter Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and palaces. Here we get the exact organization which becomes so familiar to us in the later lodges whose archives are kept, Ursus or Orso proves his right to the title of Magister by having disciples under him. The work is done in the time of "Our Lord Luitprand and our Father the Bishop," who are the presidents of the lodge, just as in later lodges the more influential citizen or body of citizens are presidents of the Opera. Then there is Refol, the Gastaldo (Grand Master). The very same term is kept up in the Lombard lodges till the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the head of the Venetian laborerium is styled the Gastaldo instead of capo maestro as in Tuscany; there is even the notary to the guild, the unworthy scribe Gondelmus.

The work is so far inferior to the ciborium at Valpolicella, that it would seem to be, as Cattaneo remarks, by an earlier hand. The ornamentation is not a finished sculpture, but only rudely cut into the surface of the stone, like a first sketch. Possibly the remuneration offered by the employer was not liberal enough to encourage Orso to put any elaborate work into the altar, or he might have blocked out the work, and left it unfinished either by reason of death, or absence.

Another famous work of that time was one which Luitprand himself caused to be sculptured by Magister Giovanni, of the Comacine Guild. It was the covering for the tomb of S. Cumianus in the monastery of Bobbio. It will be remembered that Agilulf and Theodolinda gave shelter to the Irish Saint Columbanus, and assisted him to found the convent of Bobbio. One of the monks there, another Irishman, named Cumianus, was afterwards canonized, and Luitprand built his tomb. We are told it was covered with precious marbles, which would seem to indicate something in the style which the Cosmati afterwards made so famous.

The tomb of Theodata at Pavia is a fine specimen of Comacine-Longobardic sculpture. It is now to be seen in the cortile of the Palazzo Malaspina with some other old sarcophagi. This has been called a Byzantine work, but the extreme vitality and expression in the hippogriffs and the Solomon's knots which sign it, mark the work as Comacine; besides, we are told by the most early authors that the Longobards never employed Greek artists. There is the usual mixture of Christianity and Mediævalism in the sculptures on the top of the tomb. Winged griffins with serpent tails prance on each side of a vine, from which serpents' heads look out. Fishes are in the corner, and an interlaced border, whose spaces are filled with grapes and mystic circles, frames, as it were, the design. The side is entirely Christian; and if the peacocks which drink out of a vase with a cross in it, were less lively, it might almost pass for a Byzantine design; but the Comacine Magister has set his mark even here, in his knots with neither end nor beginning, his concentric circles, and roses of Sharon; and has told us in his mystic language that Theodata was a Christian, and though tempted, clung to the cross. Theodata, a noble Roman dame, was one of the ladies of honour to Ermelind, King Cunibert's Anglo-Saxon wife.[69]

One day Ermelind incautiously described the exquisite beauty of this lady, whom she had seen in the bath, and greatly inflamed his imagination. He brutally ruined the lovely Theodata, and afterwards shut her up in a monastery, probably that of St. Agatha, which his father had built. This took place in A.D. 720. The beautiful tomb was but a poor atonement for the coarse cruelty which had spoiled her life.

The pulpit in S. Ambrogio at Milan is a really fine specimen of sixth-century work. It is supported on ten columns. Here is the true Comacine variety of columns: they are all sizes and all shapes; some round, some hexagonal; some longer, some shorter; the difference in height being made up by the capitals and pedestals being more or less high. One, which is peculiarly short, and whose capital is carved in complicated Solomon's knots, has a lion placed as abacus. This is the earliest instance I know of, of the use of the lion of Judah, in connection with the pillar (Christ). Here the lion rests on the column and supports the arches, instead of being the root of the pillar as it became in the later Romanesque style. The arches are surrounded with intricate scrolls and interlaced work; some of them clearly copied from Byzantine designs. The spaces between the arches are enriched with allegorical subjects. In one, the emblems of the apostles; in another, a choir of angels, very mediæval and heavy-headed; in another, a winged archangel. At the corner is a man in Lombard dress, holding two animals, one in each hand. It is peculiarly suggestive of the Etruscan deity with the two leopards, which is so frequently seen on the black Chiusi vases, and confirms more than ever, the tendency in mediæval Christians to cling to ancient pagan forms, giving them a new Christian significance. The frieze above the arches which forms the base of the marble panels of the Ambone, is peculiarly Comacine. Here are all the mystic animals, representing the powers of evil;—dragons, wolves, etc., bound together in a knotted scroll of one continuous vine-branch, here and there training into foliage. Reading the ornamentation by the light of mediæval symbolism, the whole thing gives us lessons appropriate to a pulpit. It tells us that Christ the pillar of the Church, descended from David the lion of Judah, is the foundation of all Gospel; that angels and saints sing the glory of God; and that Christ the vine can bind and subdue the powers of evil. The fine early Christian tomb beneath the pulpit is not necessarily connected with it. It has been called the tomb of Stilicho, with how much reason I am not prepared to say. If so it must date from the early part of the fifth century, as it was on October 8, 405, that Stilicho marched up to Fiesole from Florence to his victory over Radagaisus the Goth. The Florentines had but just been converted to Christianity at that time. The sculpture, though Christian in subject, has many signs of debased Roman style mingled with much of the mediæval.