Heraldry, with all its adjuncts, had become so great a passion with the noble, that the invention of the artist and student was taxed for badges and mottoes by noble families. The custom flourished most in Italy, where the impresa of a noble house spoke to the eye at once, whether it was found on a sword-hilt or over a church-door. We give as an instance, in [Fig. 3], that adopted by the bold Dukes of Burgundy, sovereigns in their own dominions, and exciting much terror of rivalry in the minds of the kings of France themselves. Their badge, or impresa, was indicative of their rude power; a couple of knotted clubs, saltier-wise, help to support a somewhat conventional figure of the steel used for striking the flint to produce fire; the whole surmounted by the crown, and intended to indicate by analogous reflection the vigour of the ducal house. As a bold defiance, a rival house adopted the rabot, or carpenter’s plane, by which they indicated their determination to smooth by force the formidable knots from the clubs of the proud rulers of Burgundy.
Fig. 4. | Fig. 5. |
The art of enamelling, which had reached a high degree of perfection in the Roman era, was refined upon in the middle ages, and ultimately its character was so much altered thereby that it ended in rivalling painting, rather than retaining its own particular features, as all arts should do. It may be fairly considered that originally it was used simply to enrich, by vitrified colour, articles of use and ornament. Metal was incised, and the ornamental spaces thus obtained filled with one tint of enamel colour, each compartment having its own. By this means very brilliant effects were often produced, all the more striking from the pure strength of their simplicity. It was not till the twelfth century that an attempt at floating colours together was made, and this led ultimately to a pictorial treatment of enamel which destroyed its truest character. The very old form was, however, practised in the latest days of its use; and our engraving of the very beautiful knife-handle designed by Virgil Solis at the end of the sixteenth century (Figs. [4] and [5]), was intended to be filled with a dark blue enamel, in the parts here represented in black, while the interstices of the cross-shaped ornaments above would receive some lighter tint of warmer hue. The birds and foliage would be carefully engraved, the lines of shadow filled with a permanent black, thus assuring a general brilliancy of effect. Such knives were by no means an uncommon decoration of the table at the period when this was designed: it is now a branch of art utilised until all trace of design has gone from it; for we cannot accept the slight scroll work and contour of a modern silver knife-handle as a piece of art-workmanship, when we remember the beautiful objects of the kind produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gorgeous in design and colour, and occasionally enriched by jewels or amber.
There is one class of ancient manufacturing art which has been revived for the use of the modern world with considerable success. We allude to the Roman works in mosaic, which have furnished designs for our encaustic tile-manufacturers and our floor-cloth painters. Quaint and peculiar in its necessary features, it is singularly well adapted for artisans in both materials. There is also a great variety in the ornamental details of ancient pavements, at home and abroad; the geometric forms being at times very peculiar, as in the specimen we give in the previous page ([Fig. 6]), which has been selected from one discovered at Aldborough, in Yorkshire (the Isurium Brigantum of the Romans), a lonely spot, containing many traces of its ancient importance, and which has furnished an abundance of relics for the notice of the antiquary from the days of Camden, who describes it with that happy brevity that accompanies full knowledge. The pavement we engrave may be seen in full coloured detail in Mr. Ecroyd Smith’s volume on Isurium; the borders placed on each side are portions of other pavements from the same place, selected as showing the commonest and the most unusual patterns. The variety and beauty of design and colour in encaustic tiles adopted by mediævalists, may be slightly illustrated by the quaint specimen of foliation copied in [Fig. 7]. The conjunction of four such tiles produces great variety in pattern, and excellent contrasts of colour.
