Part 7 (2/2)
Thus it came that, as we have said, the Comacine Masters were much given to symbolism.
The old Italian writers cla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses 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, chimerae, 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 cla.s.sic 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 Phnicians;[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 mediaeval 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 superst.i.tion, 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 att.i.tudes are lively, their faces grotesquely keen.
As a proof of this distinctive style, compare the Byzantine altar of S. Ambrogio at Milan, here ill.u.s.trated, with the Comacine pulpit of the same church. (_See_ page 88.)
[Ill.u.s.tration: BYZANTINE ALTAR IN THE CHURCH OF S. AMBROGIO, MILAN.
_page 74._]
So many students of architecture roughly cla.s.s 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 verita religiose, per mezzo di forme, cifre ed immagini determinate._)
An older and more authoritative testimony is given by Dionysius the Areopagite, the a.s.sociate of St. Paul, by whom he was consecrated. In his _De angelica seu celesti Hierarchia, Epistola ad Timotheum Ephaesiae 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 t.i.tus--”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 facades 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, fis.h.i.+ng for souls out of the ocean of sin. There is a beautiful example of this myth in the fresco of the s.h.i.+p (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 facade 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 vanquis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, and the second emblematizing the s.h.i.+eld of the Gospel.
In the next compartment of the facade, 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 peac.o.c.k 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 G.o.ddess, 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.
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