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Lebrun in borders harked back to the classics of Greece and Rome, thus restoring the exquisite quality of delicacy associated with a thousand designs of amphoræ, foliated scrolls and light grotesques. But he expressed himself more individually and daringly in the series called The Months and The Royal Residences.
Even this last difference is not always clearly discernible: all manner of ribaldry occurs in the details of the ecclesiastical buildings of the North, and at the time when the best of them were built, every man's house was a kind of temple; a figure of the Madonna, or of Christ, almost always occupied a niche over the principal door, and the Old Testament histories were curiously interpolated amidst the grotesques of the brackets and the gables.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery.
The wall itself will be beautiful; the inscriptions will be beautifully cut; the figurines, however cheap and simple, may have some intentional grotesques among them, but the rest will have a special truthfulness and grace; the vases will be of good shapes and the patterns will be beautiful patterns.
Wherefore the Servite Friars, wishing to give some sign of their service and devotion to that house and Pontiff, caused the arms of Leo to be made in stone, and placed in the centre of the arch in the first portico of the Nunziata, which is on the piazza; and shortly afterwards they arranged that it should be overlaid with gold by the painter Andrea di Cosimo, and adorned with grotesques, of which he was an excellent master, and with the devices of the house of Medici, and that, in addition, on either side of it there should be painted a Faith and a Charity.
Here are arches within arches: one of scriptural incidents at any rate Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel are identifiable; one of grotesques and animals; one of uncouth toilers a shepherd and woodman and so forth with God the Father on the keystone. What these mean beyond the broad fact that religion is for all, I cannot say. Angels are above, and surmounting the doorway is Christ.
There was, so to speak, that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All the eight were different from each other. A beholder was con- vinced that nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north side until he went round to the south.
Very great skill in carving is shown, all the posts, brackets, beams, and projecting rafters being formed into elaborate representations of animals and plants, or quaintly conceived grotesques; and the flat surfaces have frequently a shallow incised arabesque pattern intertwined with foliage.
It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful grotesques but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence due a phase.
The petite and mignonne of Raphael's grotesques was no longer suited to the people, or, to put it otherwise, the people were not such as seek expression in refinement, for all art is but the visible evidence of a state of mind or soul. The wish to be sumptuous and superb, then, was a force, and so the art expressed it, but in a way that holds our admiration.
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