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We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi.
If this be so, we have in this first place of Christian worship established in Rome the first instance of the application of Opus Alexandrinum to the decoration of a church. In the middle ages the fashion was beautifully imitated by artists of the Cosmati family and their school; and the mosaic pavements of this kind in the medieval churches of Rome are no older than this period.
The mosaic base of Edward the Confessor's shrine is inscribed to the effect that it was wrought by Peter of Rome. It was a dignified specimen of the best Cosmati. All the gold glass which once played its part in the scheme of decoration has been picked out, and in fact most of the pieces in the pattern are missing.
The columns of many a cloister in Italy bear just such lines of ornament, including the time when the brothers Cosmati were illuminating the pattern with their rich mosaic. Then, later still, the columns burst into the exquisite bloom of the early Renaissance, their character profoundly different, but their use the same, that of dividing scenes from one another on the same woven picture.
There is a nice Cosmati cloister at S. Scolastica, lower on the hill, an enormous also fortified-looking monastery, but to which also there is only a mule path. These places are splendidly meditative, but they do not give me the idea of hermitages in the wilderness like that ruined Abbey of Sassovivo above Foligno.
For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders.
Much early mosaic, known as Cosmati Work, is inlaid into marble, in geometric designs; twisted columns of this class of work may be seen in profusion in Rome, and the façade of Orvieto is similarly decorated. Our illustration will demonstrate the technical process as well as a description.
The mosaic pavement in Westminster Abbey Presbytery is as fine an example of Roman Cosmati mosaic as one can see north of the Alps. An inscription, almost obliterated, is interpreted by Mr. Lethaby as signifying, that in the year 1268 "Henry III. being King, and Odericus the cementarius, Richard de Ware, Abbot, brought the porphyry and divers jaspers and marbles of Thaso from Rome."
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