A favourite place for humourous figures was on the stone brackets or corbels which bear up timber roofs; examples are in the ape corbel in this article, and the responsible yet happy-looking saint at the end of the list of Contents.
When the Perpendicular style came with other arts from Italy, and the lavish spread of the Decorated was chastened and over-chastened into regularity, there came for the second or third time the same ideas from the never-dying mythologies, their concrete embodiments sometimes with eloquence rendered, nearly always with vigour. They came to the old places, but in most fulness to that most full place, the dark recess where lurks the misericorde.
Upon the whole it would appear that the grotesque, be it in the relics of a long-forgotten symbolism, in crude attempts at realism, or in the fantastic whimseys of irresponsibility, is chiefly met in the portions of the church where would occur, in the development of architecture, the problems and difficulties. They occur, so to speak, at the joints of construction. It may be that the pluteresques (grotesque and other ornaments made of metal) employed in many Spanish churches are to be accounted for in this way on the score of the facility of attachment. Where it may be questioned that the ornament was to conceal juncture, it is often to be acknowledged that it was to give external apparent lightness to masses which are in themselves joints or centres of weight. To conclude—to whatever extent we may carry our inquiries into the meaning of the grotesques in church art, we have in them undoubtedly objects whose associations are among the most ancient of the human race; whatever our opinion of their fitness for a place in the temple, it is plain that practically they could be nowhere else.
MUSICIAN ON THE INTERSECTION
OF NAVE ARCHES, ST. HELEN’S,
ABINGDON, BERKSHIRE.
