. Mazes and labyrinths; a general account of their history and developments. ing attitudes and armed withswords and shields, the right-hand figure having thehead of a beast and the label centavrvs. (There wasapparently little distinction between a Minotaur and aCentaur in the minds of some mediaeval artists.) A rather larger specimen, 5 ft. in diameter, may beseen in the church of Sta. Maria-in-Aquiro, Rome. It iscomposed of bands of porphyry and yellow and greenmarble, surrounding a central plate of porphyry, and issimilar in design to that at Lucca. Another church in thesame city, Sta. Maria
. Mazes and labyrinths; a general account of their history and developments. ing attitudes and armed withswords and shields, the right-hand figure having thehead of a beast and the label centavrvs. (There wasapparently little distinction between a Minotaur and aCentaur in the minds of some mediaeval artists.) A rather larger specimen, 5 ft. in diameter, may beseen in the church of Sta. Maria-in-Aquiro, Rome. It iscomposed of bands of porphyry and yellow and greenmarble, surrounding a central plate of porphyry, and issimilar in design to that at Lucca. Another church in thesame city, Sta. Maria-di-Trastavera, has a labyrinth com-posed of variously coloured marbles worked in the floor. 57 It is ii ft. across and was probably constructed about1190 (Fig. 45). It is now somewhat mutilated, butwas originally a most beautiful example. The fadt. thatthe inner paths consist of a series of concentric ringsrather suggests that it has at some time been repairedwithout regard to the original design; unless we acceptthe hypothesis of M. Durand that they bore a symbolic. Fig. 47.—Labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral. (Gailhabaud.) reference to the various degrees of beatitude by whichthe soul approaches heaven, as figured by Dante. Fig. 46shows another old Italian specimen. It is nearly 11 \ diameter and is to be found in the church of San Vitale,Ravenna. Designs of this nature were widely employed by themediaeval church builders in France, and, although manyof them were destroyed at the Revolution and at othertimes, several fine examples still exist. They seem to have 58 been mostly built at a rather later date than those alreadydescribed. The largest now remaining is that in ChartresCathedral (Fig. 47). It is formed of blue and white stonesand is about 40 ft. in diameter. The French poet Bouth-rays, in his Histoire de Chartres (1624), describes itin a set of Latin verses. A fine sketch of it appears in theAlbum of the thirteenth-century architect, Villard de
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectlabyrin, bookyear1922
