The Grotesque in Church Art Part 10

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPHINX FIGURE, DORCHESTER, OXON.]

A carving in the arm-rest of one of the stalls of Beverley Minster, suggested in the block on page 159, shews a sphinx with a s.h.i.+eld; there are in the same church several fine examples seated in the orthodox manner.

On a capital in the sedilia of Dorchester Abbey is a curious compound which may be cla.s.sed as a sphinx. One of the hands (or paws) is held over the eyes of a dog, which suggests the manner in which animals were anciently sacrificed. Another sphinx in the same sedilia is of the winged variety. It has the head cowled; many of the mediaeval combinatory forms are mantled.

In Worcester Cathedral is a compound of man, ox, and lion, very different from the sphinx or cherubim shapes, being a grotesque deprived of all the original poetry of the conception.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COWLED SPHINX, DORCHESTER, OXON.]

Virgil describes Scylla (the Punic _Scol_, destruction) as a beautiful figure upwards, half her body being a beautiful virgin; downwards, a horrible fish with a wolf's belly (utero). Homer similarly.

The mermaid is a frequent subject, but more monotonous in its form and action than any other creature, and is generally found executed with a respectful simplicity that scarcely ever savours of grotesqueness. The mermaid, "the sea wolf of the abyss," and the "mighty sea-woman" of Boewulf, has an early origin as a deity of fascinating but malignant tendencies.

The centaur, perhaps, ranks next to the sphinx in artistic merit. To the early Christians the centaur was merely a symbol of unbridled pa.s.sions, and all mediaeval reference cla.s.ses it as evil. Virgil mentions it as being met in numbers near the gates of Hades, and the Parthenon sculptures shew it as the enemy of men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GROTESQUE CHERUBIM, WORCESTER.]

The story of the encyclopedias regarding centaurs is that they were Thessalonian hors.e.m.e.n, whom the Greeks, ignorant of horsemans.h.i.+p, took to be half-men, half-animals. They were called, it is said, centaurs, from their skill in killing the wild bulls of the Pelion mountains, and, later, hippo-centaurs. This explanation may, in the presence of other combinatory forms, be considered doubtful, as it is more probable that this, like those, arose out of a poetic appreciation of the qualities underlying beauty of form, that is, out of an intelligent symbolism. The horse, where known, was always a favourite animal among men. Innumerable coinages attest this fact. Early Corinthian coins have the figure of Pegasus. In most the horse is shewn alone. In the next proportion he is attached to a chariot. In few is he shewn being ridden, as it is his qualities that were intended to be expressed, and not those of the being who has subjected him. One of the old Greek gold staters has a man driving a chariot in which the horse has a human head; while the man is urging the horse with the sacred three-branched rod, each branch of which terminates in a trefoil. The centaur has a yet unallotted place in the symbolism of the sun-myth. Cla.s.sic mythology says Chiron the centaur was the teacher of Apollo in music, medicine, and hunting, and centaurs are mostly sagittarii or archers, whose arrows, like those of Apollo, are the sunbeams. The centaur met in Gothic ornament is the Zodiacal Sagittarius, and true to this original derivation, the centaur is generally found with his bow and arrow.

It is said that the Irish saints, Ciaran and Nessan, are the same with the centaurs Chiron and Nessus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MATERNAL CARES OF THE CENTAUR, IFFLEY.]

A capital of the south doorway, Iffley, has a unique composition of centaurs. A female centaur, armed with bow (broken) and arrow, is suckling a child centaur after the human manner. The equine portions of the figures are in exceptionally good drawing, though the tremendous elongation of the human trunks, and the ill-rendered position, render the group very grotesque. Both the mother and child wear the cla.s.sic cestus or girdle.

The bow carried by the mother is held apparently in readiness in the left hand, while it is probable that the right breast was meant to be shown removed, as was stated of the Amazons. The mother looks off, and there is an air of alertness about the two, which is explained by the sculpture on the return of the capital, where the father-centaur is seen slaying a wolf, lion, or other beast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CENTAUR AS DRAGON SLAYER, EXETER.]

On a centaur at Exeter of the thirteenth century, the mythical idea is somewhat retained; the centaur has shot an arrow into the throat of a dragon, which is part of the ornament. This is a very rude but suggestive carving. Is the centaur but a symbol of Apollo himself?

The next block (at Ely) is also of the centaur order, though not suggestive of aggression. The figure is female, and she is playing the zither. This is of the fourteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUSICAL CENTAUR, ELY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HARPY, WINCHESTER.]

Another cla.s.sic conception which has been perpetuated in Gothic is the harpy, though in most cases without any apparent recognition of the harpy character. Exceptions are such instances as that of the harpy drawn in the chapter "Satires without Satan." In one at Winchester a fine mediaeval effect is produced by putting a hood on the human head.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IBIS-HEADED FIGURE FROM AN UNKNOWN CHURCH.]

Another curious bird combination is in a carving in the Architectural Museum, Tufton Street, London, from an unknown church. This is a semi-human figure, whose upper part is skilfully draped. The head, bent towards the ground, is that of a bird of the ibis species, and it is probable that we have here a relic of the Egyptian Mercury Thoth, who was incarnated as an ibis. Thoth is called the G.o.d of the Heart (the conscience), and the ibis was said to be sacred to him because when sleeping it a.s.sumes the shape of a heart.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SWAN SISTER, ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, WINDSOR.]

An unusual compound is that of a swan with the agreeable head of a young woman, in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. This may be one of the swan-sisters in the old story of the "Knight of the Swan."

The initial letter of this section is a fine grotesque rendering of the Egyptian G.o.ddess Athor, Athyr, or Het-her (meaning the dwelling of G.o.d.) She was the daughter of the sun, and bore in images the sun's disc.

Probably through a lapse into ignorance on the part of the priest-painters, she became of less consideration, and the signification even of her image was forgotten. She had always had as one of her representations, a bird with a human head horned and bearing the disc; but the disc began to be shewn as a tambourine, and she herself was styled "the mistress of dance and jest." As in the cosmogony of one of the Egyptian Trinities she was the Third Person, as Supreme Love, the Greeks held her to be the same as Aphrodite. The name of the sun-disc was Aten, and its wors.h.i.+p was kindred to that of Ra, the mid-day sun. The Hebrew Adonai and the Syriac Adonis have been considered to be derived from this word Aten.

Several examples of bird-compounds are in the Exeter series of misericordes of the thirteenth century. They are renderings in wood of the older Anglo-Saxon style of design, and are ludicrously grotesque.

It is scarcely to be considered that the compound figures were influenced by the prevalence of mumming in the periods of the various carvings. In this, as in many other respects, the traditions of the carvers' art protected it from being coloured by the aspect of the times, except in a limited degree, shewn in distinctly isolated examples.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BIRD-COMPOUND, EXETER.]

Non-descripts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BEARDED BIPED, ST. KATHERINE'S.]

There is a large number of bizarre works which defy natural cla.s.sification, and though in many cases they are a branch of the compound order of figures, yet they are frequently well defined as non-descripts.

These, though in one respect the most grotesque of the grotesques, do not claim lengthy description. Where they are not traceable compounds, they are often apparently the creatures of fancy, without meaning and without history. It may be, however, that could we trace it, we should find for each a pedigree as interesting, if not as old, as that of any of the sun-myths. Among the absurd figures which scarcely call for explanation are such as that shown in the initial, from the Hospital and Collegiate Church of St. Katherine by the Tower (now removed to a subst.i.tuted hospital in Regent's Park).

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CLOAKED SIN, TUFTON STREET.]

In the Architectural Museum, Tufton Street, London, is a carving from an unknown church, in which appear two figures which were not an uncommon subject for artists of the odd. These are human heads, to which are attached legs without intermediary bodies, and with tails depending from the back of the heads.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WORM OF CONSCIENCE. (_From an unknown Church._)]

In the "Pilgremage of the Sowle," printed by Caxton in 1483, translated from a French ma.n.u.script of 1435 or earlier, is a description of a man's conscience, which, there is little doubt, furnished the idealic material for these carvings. A "sowle" being "snarlyed in the trappe" of Satan, is being, by a travesty on the forms of a court of law, claimed by both the "horrible Sathanas" and its own Warden or Guardian Angel. The Devil calls for his chief witness by the name of Synderesys, but the witness calls himself the Worm of Conscience. The following is the soul's description:--"Then came forth by me an old one, that long time had hid himself nigh me, which before that time I had not perceived. He was wonderfully hideous and of cruel countenance; and he began to grin, and shewed me his jaws and gums, for teeth he had none, they all being broken and worn away. He had no body, but under his head he had only a tail, which seemed the tail of a worm of exceeding length and greatness." This strange accuser tells the Soul that he had often warned it, and so often bitten it that all his teeth were wasted and broken, his function being "to bite and wounde them that wrong themselves."[7]

The above examples are scarcely unique. In Ripon Cathedral, on a misericorde of 1489, representing the bearing of the grapes of Eschol on a staff, are two somewhat similar figures, likewise mere "n.o.bodies," though without tails. These are a covert allusion to the wonderful stories of the spies, which, it is thus hinted, are akin to the travellers' tales of mediaeval times, as well as a pun on the report that they had seen n.o.body.

[Ill.u.s.tration: n.o.bODIES, RIPON.]

It is evident that the idea of men without bodies came from the East, and also that it had credence as an actual fact. In the _Cosmographiae Universalis_, printed in 1550, they are alluded to in the following terms:--"Sunt qui cervicibus carent et in humeris habet oculos; De India ultra Gangem fluvium sita."

[Ill.u.s.tration: NON-DESCRIPT, CHRIST CHURCH, HANTS.]

There are many carvings which are more or less of the same character, and probably intended to embody the idea of conscience or sins.

The two rather indecorous figures shewn in the following block from Great Malvern are varieties doubtless typifying sins.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SINS IN SYMBOL, GREAT MALVERN.]

Rebuses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOLT-TON.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM WHITE, BEVERLEY MINSTER.]