Mediaeval Sicily, aspects of life and art in the middle ages . a little star, butfull of quaint conceits; laughing lions with con-ventional terminations, opposite a very much scaredhare; winged mermaids ; a queer woman beastwith long hind legs, no forelegs, and a floriated creature has a face at the end of his tail,another a long elegant flower ; there are hattedmen and horned women, greyhounds, monkeys, anda grotesque boy blowing a horn. The brackets areSaracenic,cunningly fashioned into trefoiled recesses,with short stalactite terminations (see PI, XI. p. 128),and lavishly painted i
Mediaeval Sicily, aspects of life and art in the middle ages . a little star, butfull of quaint conceits; laughing lions with con-ventional terminations, opposite a very much scaredhare; winged mermaids ; a queer woman beastwith long hind legs, no forelegs, and a floriated creature has a face at the end of his tail,another a long elegant flower ; there are hattedmen and horned women, greyhounds, monkeys, anda grotesque boy blowing a horn. The brackets areSaracenic,cunningly fashioned into trefoiled recesses,with short stalactite terminations (see PI, XI. p. 128),and lavishly painted in the style of the Chiaramonteones; the frieze board running below them ispainted with a pattern of flowers under a kind oftrefoiled arcading. There is a similar one froman old house in the Via Pappagallo, and a wholecollection of old brackets, mostly of the sturdyconsole type that one sees at Santo Spirito andin the churches of Taormina, for instance, butnearly all having some Saracenic reminiscence inthe love of recessed planes and in some little256 LVIII. PAINTED BRACKETS AND BOARDS FROM THE CEILING IN THE PALAZZO VATTICANI (1472), PALERMOAbove, a board from the church of S. Agostino, Trapani 257 FREDERIC II. AND SICILIAN GOTHIC carved star or whorl on the under surfaces. Veryremarkable are the long slender stalactite bracketswith regular drops, more pronounced even thanin the Palazzo Chiaramonte, from the PalazzoVatticani, dated 1472. Some of the boards fromthis palace have the Saracenic star pattern—raised,enclosing an inscription—others painted figuresubjects, for instance, of nude children, whereRenaissance feeling creeps in. Still later are thebrackets and parts of a timber ceiling now hiddenby a vaulted ceiling in one of the large halls ofthe Palazzo Aiutamicristo, built in the fine freeSicilian transitional style—that has so much incommon with the contemporary French tran-sitional style—in 1490 by Matteo Carnevalieri. * It belongs to the joys of Palermo, after
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Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectart, bookyear1910
