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Imagine a vast central space, one hundred and sixty-nine feet square,—not a flat grass-plot scattered with decaying tombs, nor planted with the severe box-wood and funereal cypresses that give so gloomy an aspect to most cloisters, but a blooming garden, adorned with shrubs and flowering vines, laid out in parterres of exquisite verdure, where, in the shade of myrtle and citron trees, fountains play, their jets caught in marble basins, only to overflow and nourish the living green about them. This garden is walled in by four long corridors, sheltered by arcades of small pointed arches with something Oriental in their curves, supported by two hundred and sixteen coupled columns of white marble, with a group of four at each angle, all of them surmounted by carved capitals of different designs, the slender shafts ornamented with mosaics and incrusted with precious marbles, some patterned in lozenges, some curved with floral designs, some fluted after the antique manner, some wound with capricious spirals,—a file of shining columns of fairy-like aspect. And, looking at this perennial garden with its ever-running fountains, surrounded by so Oriental an arcade, one might fancy one's self transported to a monastic Alhambra, or the interior of an Arabian-Night's palace.
| CAPITAL FROM MONREALE |
The capitals of the shafts that uphold the arcade (and from the slenderness of these shafts it is probable that they were inserted some time after the heavier arcade was originally built), are all different. A number of them are here illustrated. In their design the sharp acanthus foliage of the Greeks is commingled with the emblems of Christianity, such as the circle, the cross, the vine and the dove, with infinitely ingenious grotesques of birds and animals, and with human figures. The latter are represented in Byzantine costume, and Greek inscriptions everywhere appear. The workmanship of these capitals, the delicate detail of the carving, showing the constant employment of the circular drill, the almost entire concealment of the background, are tokens of the craftsmanship of the twelfth century Byzantine Greeks Contemporary personages, scenes from the old and new Testaments, real and fantastic animals, leaves, flowers, fruit,—all are represented with a wonderful liveliness of expression and with prodigious fecundity of imagination. They exhibit, as M. Dantier has said: "Toute la foi, toute la poésie du temps sculptées sur la pierre."
The cloister at Monreale has been illustrated, and other examples of its capitals shown, in The Brochure Series, Volume 1895, No. 3, and in Volume 1898, No. 1.
