Of these churches and monasteries the greater
number, dating only from the ascendancy of the Valseccas, showed an
ordered and sumptuous architecture; but one or two buildings surviving
from the period of the free city stood out among them with the austerity
of desert saints in a throng of court ecclesiastics. The columns of the
Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn
smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery
ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an
allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts,
the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk
with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously on these sculptures, which but
the day before he might have passed by as the efforts of ignorant
workmen, but which now seemed full of the significance that belongs to
any incomplete expression of human thought or feeling. Of their relation
to the growth of art he had as yet no clear notion; but as evidence of
sensations that his forefathers had struggled to record, they touched
him like the inarticulate stammerings in which childhood strives to
convey its meaning.
He found Gamba's lodging on the upper floor of a decayed palace in one
of the by-lanes near the Cathedral. The pointed arcades of this ancient
building enclosed the remains of floriated mouldings, and the walls of
the court showed traces of fresco-painting; but clothes-lines now hung
between the arches, and about the well-head in the centre of the court
sat a group of tattered women with half-naked children playing in the
dirt at their feet.
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