gold braid used in other places
on holidays. As the fifteenth century treats the architectural detail
of Graeco-Roman art, so likewise does it proceed with its sculptured
ornament; all meaning vanishes before the absorbing interest in pattern.
For there is in antique architectural ornament a much larger proportion
of significance than can strike us at first. Thus the garlands of ivy
and fruit had actually hung round the tomb before being carved on its
sides; before ornamenting its corners the rams' heads and skulls of oxen
had lain for centuries on the altar. The medallions of nymphs, centaurs,
tritons, which to us are so meaningless and irrelevant, had a reference
either to the divinity or to the worshippers; and there is probably
almost as much spontaneous symbolism in the little cinerary box in the
Capitol (of a person called Felix), with its variously employed genii,
making music, carrying lanterns and torches, burning or extinguished
under a trellis hung with tragic masks, as in any Gothic tomb with
angels drawing the curtains of the deathbed. There has been, with the
change of religion, an interruption in the symbolic tradition; yet,
though we no longer interpret with readiness this dead language of
paganism, we feel, if we are the least attentive, that it contains
a real meaning. We feel that the sculptors cared not merely for the
representation, but also for the object represented. These things were
dear to them, a part of their life, their worship, their love; and they
put as much observation into their work as any Gothic sculptor, and
often as much fancy and humour (though both more beautiful), as one may
judge, with plenty of comparison at hand, by a certain antique altar in
Siena Cathedral, none of whose Gothic animals come up to the wonderful
half-human rams' heads and bored, cross griffins of this forlorn fragment
of paganism. The significance of classic ornament the men of the
fifteenth century straightway overlooked. They laid hold of it as
merely so much form, joining sirens, griffins, garlands, rams' heads,
victories, without a suspicion that they might mean or suggest anything.
They do, in fact, mean nothing, in most Florentine work, besides
exquisite pattern; in the less subtle atmosphere of Venice they reach
that frank senselessness which has moved the wrath of Ruskin. But what a
charm have not even those foolish monuments of doges and admirals, tier
upon tier of triumphal arch, of delicately flowere