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Now M. Didron is quite the best writer on art that I know, full of sense and intelligence; but of course, as a modern Frenchman, one of a nation for whom the Latin and Gothic ideas of libertas have entirely vanished, he is not on his guard against the trap here laid for him.
"The Ophites," says Didron, "considered the God of the Jews not only to be a most wicked but an unintelligent being.... According to their account, Jalda-baoth, the wicked demi-god adored by the Jews under the name of Jehovah, was jealous of man, and wished to prevent the progress of knowledge; but the serpent, the agent of superior wisdom, came to teach man what course he ought to pursue, and by what means he might regain the knowledge of good and evil.
This is a question which some modern discoveries will at last enable us to solve. M. Didron, in his "Annales Archeologiques," presents us with an engraving, copied from the painted glass of a window in the cathedral of Chartres, in France. The painting was executed in the thirteenth century, and represents a number of operative masons at work. Three of them are adorned with laurel crowns.
Didron, in his invaluable work on Christian Iconography, gives one of these symbols, which was carved on wood in the seventeenth century, of which I annex a copy. But even in the earliest ages, when the Deity was painted or sculptured as a personage, the nimbus, or glory, which surrounded the head of the Father, was often made to assume a triangular form.
Didron considers this a most important piece of bronze from an iconographic point of view theologically and poetically. The archaic qualities of the figures are fascinating and sometimes diverting.
"C'est bien la liberte!" "On lit parfaitement libertas." Not so, my good M. Didron! a very different personage, this; of whom more, presently, though the letters of her name are indeed so plainly, 'Libertas, at non liberalitas, liberalitas being the Latin for largesse, not for franchise.
In an antique formal Greek version we have the Presentation exactly according to the pattern described by Didron. The great gold censer is there; the cupola, at top; Joseph carrying the two young pigeons, and Anna behind Simeon. In a celebrated composition by Fra Bartolomeo, there is the same disposition of the personages, but an additional female figure.
"Didron is almost justified in saying that it is a compendium of those great encyclopædias composed in the thirteenth century; only the theory that he bases on this truthful observation wanders off and becomes faulty as soon as he tries to work it out.
Didron believed them to represent the domestic and social virtues; but the question has been finally and definitively settled by the most erudite and clearsighted symbolist of our day, Madame Félicie d'Ayzac, who, in a very edifying pamphlet published in 1843 on these statues and on the animals of the Tetramorph, has proved to demonstration that these fourteen queens are none else than the fourteen heavenly Beatitudes as enumerated by Saint Anselm: Beauty, Liberty, Honour, Joy, Pleasure, Agility, Strength, Concord, Friendship, Length of Days, Power, Health, Safety, and Wisdom.
And then, before obtaining the money needful for the work, he at once set out the lines of a noble church as traced by the splendour of the red light. The first foundation, afterwards removed to Gandersheim. For other instances of churches laid out on lines said to have been revealed in dreams or visions, see Didron, Christian Iconography, vol. i. pp. 381, 382, 460, and Sta. Maria Maggiore, Rome.
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