Page:Arts & Crafts Essays.djvu/205

 used as a ground-work for gilding upon. Abundant illustration of this usage will be found in the pictures by the early Italian masters in the National Gallery. The retables of altars were largely decorated in this material, a notable example being that still existing in Westminster Abbey.

Many of the gorgeous accessories to the panoply of war in mediæval times, such as decorative shields and the lighter military accoutrements, were thus ornamented in low relief, and on the high-cruppered and high-peaked saddles it was abundantly displayed. In the sixteenth-century work of Germany it seems to have received an admixture of finely-pounded lithographic stone, or hone stone, by which it became of such hardness as to be taken for sculpture in these materials. Its chief use, however, was for the decoration of the caskets 181