The arts and crafts of our Teutonic forefathers . , conversely, that the interlaced bands arereally the bodies of lacertine animals that have losttheir heads and tails. Neither of these supposi-tions is historically correct, but it is quite true thatthe entrelacs and the animals approach each otherso nearly that they combine into what is to all in-tents and purposes a single motive. Though theserpent form does occur, the beast was originallyin almost every case a quadruped, and in the ship-wreck that its anatomy generally suffers it managesvery often to preserve at least a single claw. Thebody
The arts and crafts of our Teutonic forefathers . , conversely, that the interlaced bands arereally the bodies of lacertine animals that have losttheir heads and tails. Neither of these supposi-tions is historically correct, but it is quite true thatthe entrelacs and the animals approach each otherso nearly that they combine into what is to all in-tents and purposes a single motive. Though theserpent form does occur, the beast was originallyin almost every case a quadruped, and in the ship-wreck that its anatomy generally suffers it managesvery often to preserve at least a single claw. Thebody of the creature is however prolonged in ribbonshape, and is often delineated in exactly the sameway as the band of an inorganic interlacement. Upon the human figure as a motive in Germanicornament there is little to be added to what wassaid on a previous page (ante, p. 19). Where thefigure is correctly and effectively rendered the mod-els for it are drawn from the Mediterranean world and not from Teutonic sources. In the o^enuine 224 PLATE XXXI.
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