PLATE CVII.
The beauty of the form, material, and decoration, of the objects grouped in the present Plate, scarcelyrequire to be pointed out in detail to the intelligent observer. The coloured enrichments, which are veryjudiciously introduced, are executed in enamel of the description known as the “ painted ” and the “ trans-lucent.” The peculiar processes by which these are applied we shall take occasion to describe hereafter;at present we proceed with the general history of the art, in continuation of our former notice (Plate LI.).
The term champleve has been happily applied by the French antiquaries to the second great divisionof incrusted enamels; which, although presenting no very dissimilar appearance to the cloisonnes, were executedby a different process—one that had the advantage of being exceedingly simple, and was probably inventedby those half-civilised nations whom Philostratus designates, in the third century, as the “barbarians nearthe ocean,”* who, he says, possessed the art of fixing colours upon brass.
In our notice of the Byzantine and Italian works, we mentioned that the cells for the reception of thedifferent enamels were formed by thin bands of gold attached to the ground; but in the ornaments of theWestern nations these cells are made by removing the ground of the metal itself to the depth of aboutone-sixteenth or one-eighth of an inch, leaving thin strips of the material (nearly always brass) to separatethe enamels. Ornaments of this description are for the most part discovered in Great Britain and thenorth-western parts of France . It is, therefore, not improbable that many of them may have been producedby the artists of Limoges—a city which, during the whole of the Roman occupation of Gaul , was a greatemporium for works in the precious metals, and eventually gave her name to a branch of this very art. But littlelight is thrown upon the art-history of this city by the scanty chronicles of the dark ages. That it possesseda school of skilful goldsmiths is apparent from the fact that Eloi, the best workman of his age, was educatedthere by Abbon, the moneyer; but there exists no information respecting the subject of our inquiry, beyondsome obscure notices of an enamelled chalice and ring, said to have been the property of the great saint; andeven these, it is not improbable, were, like most of the contemporary ornaments, of cloisonne work. In
fact, there is a great lacuna in the history of champleve enamelling between the Gallo-Roman period and
the reappearance of the art in the eleventh century under Byzantine influence.
This Byzantine influence came through the Venetians , who, as early as 979, established a “comptoir,or factory, at Limoges , for the reception and sale of the “spiceries” and fabrics imported from the Levant toMarseilles : a land journey conveyed them to the “ comptoir,” whence they were distributed throughout thewest of France. At that period few people were so completely imbued with Byzantine art as the Venetians .They had received and employed the artists expelled by the iconoclast emperors; a great part of theii ti ade
was to the capital of the East, and finally they were in the habit of commissioning Greek aitists to execute
works in which more than usual skill was required; such, for instance, as the Palliotto, concerning which it
* These were probably the inhabitants of the north-western part of Gaul , from whom the art may have been communicated to tie Britons,and thence it passed to Ireland. One of the finest examples of British work is a vase found in Essex, in 1834, and en D iave v“ Archaeologia.”