Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 1.djvu/95

Rh light which envelopes all the body from the feet to the top of the head. The word aureole is much used in Christian iconography; but it is vague, and people apply it sometimes to the ornament of the head, and at others to that of the body. We here restrict and adopt it entirely to the great nimbus, which incloses, almost always, Jesus Christ, and sometimes the Virgin. It is true that antiquaries call this nimbus the fish's bladder ; but a dignified terminology ought to reject such an expression for its coarseness; it was invented by the English antiquaries, who repeat it perpetually. Moreover this denomination is false, for very often the aureole has not the form of a bladder, as we shall see. It has also been called the divine oval, and the mystic almond; the word mystic prejudges, before any examination, a symbolical intention, which we have very good reasons for doubting. Moreover, it is frequently neither an oval nor an almond; it is simply what the nimbus is to the head. The head being round, the nimbus is round; the body when upright forms a lengthened oval, and the aureole also lengthens itself generally into a form nearly oval. But when the body is seated, the oval contracts itself into a circle, sometimes into a quatrefoil; because then the four protruding parts of the body, the head, legs, and two arms, have each their particular lobe, their section of the nimbus, and the torso is collected into the centre of the four leaves." M. Didron gives many examples of the aureole in its different forms. The most common is that represented in our fig. 1, where Christ is seated on a section of a rainbow: this figure is the vesica piscis of the English antiquaries. In the preceding figure (fig. 7.), taken from a MS. of the tenth century in the Royal Library at Paris, Christ appears in an aureole formed of clouds, which mould themselves to the shape of the body.

In Italy especially, and indeed most generally in other countries, the outline of the aureole is more regular and geometrical. It is in some instances a perfect circle. The accompanying cut (fig. 8.) is taken from a fresco in the great church of the convent of Salamina in