. The Greek artist would never have
approved of natural flowers or trees, embroidered as if growing out of
a dado, simulating a garden worked in wool. This would have been
considered a bad attempt at pictorial art.

M. Louis de Ronchaud, in his "Tapisseries des Anciens," speaks of the
hangings which he supposes to have decked the recess that contained
the chryselephantine statue of Athene Parthenos in her temple at
Athens. He says these votive hangings dressed the pillars that
surrounded the Hecatompedon, and formed a tent over the head of the
goddess. M. de Ronchaud believes that among the subjects of the
Delphic embroideries, described by Euripides in the tragedy of Ion,
may be recognized some derived from the designs on saffron-coloured
hangings, spoken of by the poet as "the wings of the peplos."[456]

The downfall of decorative art, domestic as well as national, kept
pace with the downfall of the Roman Empire. During the Dark Ages, of
such art there seems to have been very little; and of that the best
was Celtic or Anglo-Saxon. But the darkness shrouds from our view the
artistic life of the world, and the dawn was very long in breaking. We
must therefore return to the subject of hangings, after a gap of
nearly a thousand years, when the first stirrings of the European
revival came, in the twelfth century.[457] Symonds says: "The arts and
the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became
vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the
shores of that Dead Sea which we call 'The Middle Ages.'"[458]

There can be no doubt that, during the Dark Ages, hangings woven and
embroidered continued to be the custom throughout Europe. Our own
Anglo-Saxon records prove that such furnishings were employed to
mitigate the cold bareness of our northern homes from the earliest
times. Sir G. Dasent informs me that in Icelandic Sagas, as early as
the eleventh century, there are frequent notices of hangings both in
churches and in the halls of houses; such, for instance, as the Saga
of Charlemagne, i.e. scenes out of Charlemagne's life, worked on
hangings 20 ells long. In Scaldic poetry, a periphrasis for a "lady"
is "the ground of hangings," or "the bridge of hangings," all pointing
to embroidery.

From illuminated MSS. engraved in Strutt's "Antiquities of the
English," and contemporary European work of the tenth to the
thirteenth centuries, we find that the favourite style of embroidery,
when