Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 11.djvu/95

Rh desire him.' From this they seem to have concluded that our Saviour's person was even deformed! and the followers and admirers of the advocates of this strange doctrine—especially the monkish orders of St. Basil for instance—adopted these views to their full extent. Thus, a peculiar character of stiffness and even ugliness is found to pervade the illustrative Art of the Eastern schools, as well as wherever the same influence extended. Happily for Art, another and entirely different view was taken by other learned doctors of the Church, of quite equal authority and orthodoxy, They rejected the reasoning of the Eastern divines and adopted the more philosophical principle, that beauty of sentiment should be illustrated by beauty of form; and argued that no beauty could be too great to represent the founder of Christianity, or to illustrate so divine and perfect a religion as that which He had taught. The influence of Pope Adrian I., supported by the high authority of St. Ambrose and others, went far to establish this opinion; and fixed, indeed, that type or character of representation which has prevailed generally in the Latin (or Western) Church—and which led, eventually, and by slow degrees, to those affecting and beautiful representations of the Saviour, the Virgin, the Apostles and other holy persons which are found in the painting and sculpture of the Italian schools of the purer times of Christian Art. With respect to the strange adaptation of the human figure to the tortuous shapes of the ornament on those crosses, I am disposed to think that no particular meaning is intended by it. It is probably a mere exercise of ingenuity on the part of the artist to try bow far the figure could be made to fill or fit into the spaces. I am further confirmed in this opinion from seeing the outrageous liberty that is taken with the human form in order to accommodate it to the very inconvenient and distressing postures it is made to assume."

The Hon. communicated the following notice of a Roman Villa lately discovered in the course of his excavations near Audley End, of which mention had been made at previous meetings:—

"The remains of this building are in a field called Chinnels, on Lord Braybrooke's property, in the parish of Wendens Ambo, which, as