into view, that is, the form of it which was developed rather in the provinces than in the capital. An enormous body of this Roman provincial art has been revealed by French researches in North Africa, and the study of local antiquities in Italy, France, Spain, South Germany, and even Britain, shews how far this little-known art had developed or degenerated from the standards of the Augustan age. This art is rude and redundant, shewing a ferment of undisciplined ideas, and in it we may find many of the germs of the Christian architecture of the West which, by a true instinct, has been called Romanesque.
Probably the best centre in which to study provincial Roman art is Trèves, where a perfectly arranged museum is crowded with smaller monuments, while many large ones are still extant in the streets. Among the latter are a magnificent basilica, now a church, a great city gate, the Porta Nigra, and a ruined palace, usually called that of Augustus, although apparently it must belong to the fourth century. The monuments in the museum comprise a great number of important, richly sculptured, tombs, some of which are of the sarcophagus form, while others are like small towers crowned by a pyramid, with a sculptured finial at the apex, a form which recalls many a Romanesque tower and spire built centuries later. They themselves seem to derive from the mausoleum of Halicarnassus. The sloping surfaces of the pyramidal coverings are roughly carved into leafage arranged like scales, and the rest of these monuments is adorned with a profusion of sculptured figures and pattern-work. The large plain surfaces are frequently covered by what, in later art, we should call diaper patterns, that is, recurring arrangements of lozenges, octagons and circles, combined so as to cover the field and with the interspaces filled in with simply-carved leafage. This type of ornamentation is practically unknown in classical Roman architecture. It was doubtless taken up from the East, and it is the precursor of a kind of decoration, which thenceforth was to be common for many centuries; indeed, the covering of flat vertical surfaces with roughly cut patterns in low relief is typical of the art of the "Dark Ages." It may be noted that the surface patterns, and even the figure sculptures, on the monuments of Trèves were painted with bright colours, and hence it seems probable that the elaborate braided and chequered ornamentation of our own Saxon crosses was completed by colouring.
What we have found best illustrated at Trèves must have been characteristic, in greater or lesser degree, of all the cities of western Europe[1]. Even in London, at the Guildhall and British Museums, there are fragments which shew that a similar type of architecture prevailed here. Amongst the stones are some which clearly belong to tombs with pyramidal coverings like those mentioned above, and other stones, some of which belong to small columns, have diaper pattern-work. These fragments
- ↑ Even in Britain the lion dug up at Corbridge (Corstopitum) is a striking example.
