“When the Anglo-Saxon had almost forgotten Midgarth’s Orm, and the ancient Egyptian snake-symbol, as old as the Rameside period, had been introduced as a new design (Plate [VII.], Fig. 8), this itself fell a prey to the dominant skeuomorph, and was doubled and entangled in obedience to the over-mastering expectancy of the day.”
Figs. 110, 111.—Modified human figures on the shaft of a cross at Ilam, near Ashbourne; after Browne.
“It must be clear,” continues Dr. Colley March, “that such transformations as these were due to something more than the successive copying of a copy by ignorant and slovenly artificers, as in those degenerate changes wrought by Gaulish imitators of the stater of Philip of Macedon. In that case the original coin was not before them; they had no artistic impulse or intention, their only object was to fabricate passable pieces of money. But the men whose ‘taste’ is disclosed by the work we have just considered were swayed by an influence they could not have understood. The expectancy that controlled them they inherited. The withy-band had wrapped itself round all their conceptions.” But the result was enrichment and not degradation, and the curious designs their art produced show us the only portal through which the animal form can enter into ornament, by resolving itself, namely, into the angles, curves, and scrolls of symmetrical repetition.
“Many pauses took place ere the process was completed. Now one part of the body was surrendered to the skeuomorph and anon another. Conventionalism established a temporary truce, but the war of structure against nature broke out afresh, and the grotesque appeared. We look upon the death-grasp of a writhing quadruped, the knotted convolutions of a serpent, the spectral gleam of a vanishing face. And then, when all was over, when the battle on the ornamental field was lost and won, nothing was left but a zoomorph of contrasted curves and symmetrical scrolls.”
The human form is not exempt from the skeuomorphic inroad. The two men in Fig. 4, Plate [VII.], which is taken from an illuminated page of the Gospel of Mac Regol, at Oxford, are suffering from but a mild attack, but the men on the Pre-Norman font at Checkley, near Uttoxeter, and similar figures (Figs. [110], [111]) on a cross at Ilam, five miles from Ashbourne, have all but succumbed.