No. 25. Saturn Devouring his Child.
The period between antiquity and the middle ages was one of such great and general destruction, that the gulf between ancient and mediæval art seems to us greater and more abrupt than it really was. The want of monuments, no doubt, prevents our seeing the gradual change of one into the other, but nevertheless enough of facts remain to convince us that it was not a sudden change. It is now indeed generally understood that the knowledge and practice of the arts and manufactures of the Romans were handed onward from master to pupil after the empire had fallen; and this took place especially in the towns, so that the workmanship which had been declining in character during the later periods of the empire, only continued in the course of degradation afterwards. Thus, in the first Christian edifices, the builders who were employed, or at least many of them, must have been pagans, and they would follow their old models of ornamentation, introducing the same grotesque figures, the same masks and monstrous faces, and even sometimes the same subjects from the old mythology, to which they had been accustomed. It is to be observed, too, that this kind of iconographical ornamentation had been encroaching more and more upon the old architectural purity during the latter ages of the empire, and that it was employed more profusely in the later works, from which this taste was transferred to the ecclesiastical and to the domestic architecture of the middle ages. After the workmen themselves had become Christians, they still found pagan emblems and figures in their models, and still went on imitating them, sometimes merely copying, and at others turning them to caricature or burlesque. And this tendency continued so long, that, at a much later date, where there still existed remains of Roman buildings, the mediæval architects adopted them as models, and did not hesitate to copy the sculpture, although it might be evidently pagan in character. The accompanying cut (No. 25) represents a bracket in the church of Mont Majour, near Nismes, built in the tenth century. The subject is a monstrous head eating a child, and we can hardly doubt that it was really intended for a caricature on Saturn devouring one of his children.
Sometimes the mediæval sculptors mistook the emblematical designs of the Romans, and misapplied them, and gave an allegorical meaning to that which was not intended to be emblematical or allegorical, until the subjects themselves became extremely confused. They readily employed that class of parody of the ancients in which animals were represented performing the actions of men, and they had a great taste for monsters of every description, especially those which were made up of portions of incongruous animals joined together, in contradiction to the precept of Horace:—
Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam
Jungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas,
Undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
Desinet in piscem mulier formosa superne;
Spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?