ling
with human beings, they are devouring each another, the appearance of
the poor little scared men being only an interlude in the everlasting
massacre of one beast by another. The people who worked this frieze may
have pretended, perhaps, that they were expressing the pleasures of
hunting; but what they actually realised was evidently the horrors of a
world given over to ravening creatures. The porch sculptures of this
and all the other churches of Lucca remove all further doubt upon this
point. For here what human beings there lie under the belly and in the
claws (sometimes a mere horrid mangled human head) of the lions and
lionesses who project like beamheads out of the wall or carry the porch
columns on their back: scowling, murderous creatures, with which the
twelfth and early thirteenth century ornamented even houses and public
tanks like Fonte Branda, which less terrified generations adorned with
personified virtues. The nightmare of wild beasts is carried on in the
inside of the churches: there again, under the columns of the pulpits
are the lions and lionesses gnashing their teeth, tearing stags and
gazelles and playing with human heads. And, to increase the horror,
there also loom on the capitals of the nave strange unknown birds of
prey, fantastic terrible vultures and griffins. Everywhere massacre and
nightmare in those churches of Lucca. And the impression they made on
my mind was naturally strengthened by the recollection of the similar
and often more terrible carvings in other places, Milan, Pavia, Modena,
Volterra, the Pistoiese and Lucchese hill-towns, in all other places
rich in pre-Franciscan art. Above all, there came to my mind the image
of the human figures which in most of such pre-Franciscan places express
the other half of all this terror, the feelings of mankind in this kingdom
of wicked, mysterious wild beasts. I allude to the terrible figures,
crushed into dwarfs and hunchbacks by the weight of porch columns and
pulpits, amid which the tragic creature, with broken spine and starting
eyes, of Sant' Ambrogio of Milan is, through sheer horrified realisation,
a sort of masterpiece. But there are wild beasts, lions and lionesses,
among the works of thirteenth-century sculptors, and lions and lionesses
continue for a long time as ornaments of pure Gothic architecture. Of
course; but it was the very nearness of the resemblance of these later
creatures that brought home to me the utterly different, t