As far as I can find from my own observations, there is this difference between the Byzantine and Comacine mazes; the Byzantine worked for effect, to get a surface well covered. His knots and scrolls are beautifully finished and clearly cut with geometrical precision, but the line is not continuous; it is a pretty pattern repeated over and over, but has no suggestion of meaning.
The Comacine, on the contrary, believed in his mystic knot; to him it was, as I have said, a sign of the inscrutable and infinite ways of God, whose nature is unity. The traditional name of these interlacings among Italians is "Solomon's knot."
I have seen a tiny ancient Lombard church, in the mountains of the Apuan Alps, built before the tenth century, of large blocks of stone, fitted and dovetailed into each other with a precision almost Etruscan. High up in the northern wall is a single carved stone some three feet long, representing a rude interlaced knot.[65] We asked a peasant what it was.
"Oh, it's an ancient girigogolo," said he, by which I presume he meant hieroglyphic.
On going to a higher fount and asking the priest, we got the information that it was a "Solomon's knot," and that such intrecci were found on nearly all the very ancient churches. He supposed it had some meaning—and thought it expressed eternity, as the knots had no end and no beginning. The Italian philologist, Sebastian Ciampi, gives these interlacings a very ancient origin. "We may observe," he writes, "in the sculpture of the so-called barbarous ages on capitals, or carved stones, that they used to engrave serpents interlaced with curious convolutions. On the wall too they sculptured that labyrinth of line which is believed to be the Gordian knot, and other similar ornaments to which Italians give the generic name of meandri. I do not think that all these representations were merely adapted for ornament, but that they had some mystic meaning. I am not prepared to say whether our forefathers received such emblems from the Northern people who so frequently peregrinated in Italy, or from the Asiatic countries. This is certain, the use of such ornamentation is extremely antique, and we find it adopted by the Persians, and see it in Turkish money, and carpets, and other works of Oriental art."[66] Ciampi goes on to find the root of these emblems, both the Runic knot and the Comacine intreccio, in the Cabirus of the ancient Orientals. It is possible that the ancient serpent worship of the Druids and other Northern nations, was in some way descended from the same root. In any case they were transmitted to the Longobardic Comacines through the early Christian Collegia of Rome, as we see by the plutei in San Clemente, S. Agnese, etc., and by the beautiful single-cord interweavings on the door of a chapel in S. Prassede.
Comacine Knot on a panel at S. Ambrogio, Milan. One strand forms the whole. From Cattaneo's "Architettura."