Stephen
of Hungary, husband of Henry's sister Gisela--originally a closed
_casula_ covering the body, but now an open cloak richly embroidered
with figures of prophets, animals, and foliages, and even portraits of
the King and Queen. It has sometimes been thought, from the inscription
on its border, that, like the Bayeux tapestries of Queen Matilda, the
needlework was from the Queen's own hand; but no doubt both these
attributions are mistaken.[47] Still more Saracenic in taste are the
mantle and alb now in the Imperial Treasury at Vienna, of the twelfth
century, and executed at Palermo. Sicilian in some respects is
intermediate between Italian and German, hence we deem this a proper
place to speak of it, and rather as a transient phase than a style, for
it perished with the Hohenstaufen dynasty.
[47] See description in Bock, _Die Kleinodien des heiligen R?misches
Reichs_, pl. 17.
The cruel tyranny of the cold-blooded despot, remembered, but execrated,
in Sicily as Charles of Anjou, extinguished the last _scintilla_ of
native art, and when the Italian revival of the thirteenth century took
place, it was confined entirely to the North, except when such patrons
as Robert or Ferdinand or Alfonso encouraged Tuscan artists by inviting
them to Naples.
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