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The Major told me that the Austrians were almost in Cividale, staggering news. Tractors and lorries were to come and take away our guns and stores in the evening. But the number of tractors was very limited and Raven was doubtful if enough would come in time.
These are somewhat the characteristics of the cathedral at Cividale, of which two Capodistrians, Bartolommeo Costa and Giovanni Sedula, were architects. It was reconsecrated in 1445, but the upper part was not finished till 1598. The side doors, with beautiful arabesques carved on the jambs, were constructed with material from the tribune in which the big Carpaccio was housed.
Two of the patterns are exactly like some at Muggia Vecchia; others resemble ornamented pillars of the door of S. Ambrogio, Milan; others are very like the fragments preserved at S. Maria in Valle, Cividale; whilst a band of interlacings resembles one which occurs on an Assyrian cylinder, not only in its forms, but in its irregularities. A piece of antique fluted pilaster now does duty as a base.
All these carvings were probably executed by Comacines, documentary evidence of whose presence in the country, brought from Cividale by the Croatian ban, has been found by Mgr. Bulić. Two sculptors only are known by inscriptions earlier than the Benedictines, who took a leading part in the development of mediæval Dalmatian sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These are Mag.
Benevento survived as a Lombard duchy till the Norman Conquest. The kingdom of the Lombards endured two centuries, and left ineffaceable marks upon Italy. A cordon of military cities was drawn round the old Roman centers in Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Duchy of Spoleto. Pavia rose against Milan, which had been a second Rome, Cividale against Aquileia, Fiesole against Florence, Lucca against Pisa.
The slabs are all of Istrian stone, except one, which is of marble, and the carvings therefore may possibly to some extent be of local workmanship, though we know that Comacines from Cividale were employed in Croatia. They have the characteristic Lombard furrows and interweavings, and other details met with in different parts of Italy.
In 611 the Huns or Slovens descended on Istria, in 670 they were defeated near Cividale by Duke Vetturi, and in 718 were conquered in three battles near Lauriana by Duke Pemmo. His son Ratchis copied the bad example of the Huns, sacking and killing far into Carniola.
On the 27th Cividale, on the 28th Gorizia, and on the 29th Udine, twelve miles within the Italian frontier, fell, and Von Buelow had taken 100,000 prisoners and 700 guns. The Third Army escaped by the skin of its teeth, the excellence of its discipline, and the sacrifice of its rearguards and 500 guns at the crossing of the Tagliamento at Latisana on 1 November.
Among them are several archivolt pieces, very much like those of the font of Calixtus at Cividale, which show by a mutilated inscription that they were due to Bishop Maurizio, apparently a bishop suspected of being on the side of the Franks, and therefore blinded by the Byzantines in 781.
Milan, for example, down-trodden by Pavia, still remained the major See of Lombardy. Aquileia, though a desert, had her patriarch, while Cividale, established as a fortress to coerce the neighboring Roman towns, was ecclesiastically but a village. At this epoch a third power emerged in Italy.
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