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2 MEDIAEVAL GEM ENGRAVING.
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in
elaborating it counted for much. Another consideration also influenced-
this preference, the greater facility of executing a.tolerable work in
relief than in intaglio: a fact declared from the .first by the nascent
art producing the per-fectly;modeled Etruscan scarabs, which serve as
vehicles for "such barbarous" intagli upon their bases, and confirmed
by this second childhood of the Byzantine school.
It
is at first sight apparent,lfrom two considerations, that the genuine
Gothic artists never attempted engraving upon hard stones. I The first,
and this an argument of the greatest weight, is that no gems are to be
met with exhibiting purely Gothic designs. We know from the innumerable
seals preserved, both official and personal, many of them most
elaborately drawn and artistically executed, what would be the designs
that gems engraved by a hand contemporary with these seals must
necessarily have exhibited ; for, as the analogy of the two arts
requires, the same hand would have cut the intagli in stone and the
seals in metal. Thus at a later time we find that the famous
gem-engravers of the Revival, such as II Greco, Matteo del Nassaro, and
Valerio Belli, were also die sinkers. Any gems, therefore, engraved
either in Italy, France, or Germany between the years 900 and 1453
would necessarily present such subjects as saints in ecclesiastical or
monastic costume, knights arrayed in the armour of their times, and,
above all, architectural embellishments, canopies and niches, the
customary decorations of the mediaeval seals in metal.
Besides
this restriction as to subjects, the drawing of those ages has, even in
its highest correctness, a peculiar character never to be mistaken, and
which even pervades the paintings of the Italian school down to late in
the fifteenth century, and those of the German for a century longer.
Lastly, a class of subjects distinct from any known to antique glyptic
art, armorial bearings arranged according to the rules of heraldry,
would have constituted a large portion of anything executed in those
times for seals, and yet such are wholly deficient.1 Again,
in the choice of the antique intagli set in mediaeval seals, there is
often evident a desire to pick out some figure agreeing with the
owner's cognisance. And indeed some of the metal seals exhibit in their
heraldic animals an attempt to
1 Sse note 4, page 325.
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