Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/58

 as a substantive; and silken textiles of Tyrian dye, sprinkled all over with large round spots, were once in great demand. Shortly after, 795, Pope Leo, among his several other gifts to the churches at Rome, bestowed a great number of altar frontals made of this purple and gold fabric, as we are told by Anastasius. To the altar of St. Paul's the pontiff sent "vestem super altare albam chrysoclavam;" but to another "vestem chrysoclavam ex blattin Byzanteo." Sometimes these "clavi" were made so large that upon their golden ground an event in the life of a saint, or the saint's head, was embroidered, and then the whole piece was called "sigillata," or sealed.

Stauracin, or "stauracinus," taking its name from [Greek: stauros], the Greek for "cross," was a silken stuff figured with small plain crosses, and therefore from their number sometimes further distinguished by the word signifying that meaning in Greek,

Polystauron. Of such a textile St. Leo gave presents to churches, as we learn from Anastasius, lib. Pont. ii. 265.

How much silken textiles figured with the cross were in request for church adornment we learn from Fortunatus, who, about the year 565, thus describes the hangings of an oratory in a church at Tours—

Pallia nam meruit, sunt quæ cruce textile pulchra,

Serica qua niveis sunt agnava blattea telis, Et textis crucibus magnificatur opus.

Very often the crosses woven on these fabrics were of the simplest shape; oftener were they designed after an elaborate type with a symbolic meaning about it that afforded an especial name to the stuffs upon which they were figured, the first of which that claims our notice is denominated

Gammadion, or Gammadiæ, a word applied as often to the pattern upon silks as the figures wrought upon gold and silver for use in churches, we so repeatedly come upon in the "Liber Pontificalis."

In the Greek alphabet the capital letter of gamma takes the shape of an exact right angle thus, [Greek: G]. Being so, many writers have beheld in it an emblem of our Lord as our corner-stone. Following this idea artists at a very early period struck out a way of forming the cross after several shapes by various combinations with it of this letter [Greek: G]. Four of these gammas put so fall into the shape of the so-called Greek cross; and in this form it was woven upon the textiles denominated "stauracinæ;"