225. The nebris of Dionusos and leopard-skin of the priests of Egypt relate to astronomy, not war; and the interest in their spots and bars, as variously symbolic, together with real pleasure in their grotesqueness, greatly modified the entire system of Egyptian colour-decoration. On the earliest Greek vases, also, the spots and bars of the animals are carried out in spots or chequers upon the ground, (sometimes representing flowers), and the delight in "divers colours of needlework," and in fantasy of embroidery, gradually refine and illumine the design of Eastern dress. But only the patterns derived from the colours of animals become classical in heraldry under the general name of "furres," one of them "vaire" or verrey ("the variegated fur,") rudely figuring the material composed of the skins of small animals sewn together, alternately head to tail; the other, ermine, peculiarly honourable, from the costliness, to southern nations, of the fur it represents. 226. The name of the principal heraldic colour has a similar origin: the "rams' skins dyed red" which were used for the curtains of the Jewish tabernacle, were always one of the principal articles of commerce between the east and west: in mediæval Latin they were called "gulae," and in the French plural "gules," so that to be dressed in "gules" came gradually to mean being dressed in the particular red of those skins, which was a full soft scarlet, not dazzling, but warm and glowing. It is used, in opposition to darker purple, in large masses in the fresco painting of later Rome;--is the dominant colour of ornamental writing in the middle ages (giving us the ecclesiastical term "rubric"), and asserts itself finally, and most nobly, in the fresco paintings of Ghirlandajo and Luini. I have tried to represent very closely the tint of it Luini has given to St. Catherine's mantle, in my study in your schools. Titian keeps it also as the keynote of his frescoes; so also Tintoret; but Raphael, Correggio, and Michael Angelo, all substituted orange for it in opposition to purple; and the entire scheme of colour in the Vatican frescoes is of orange and purple, broken by green and white, on a ground of grey. This orange and purple opposition in meaner hands became gaudy and feeble, and the system of mediæval colour was at last totally destroyed by it; the orange remaining to this day the favourite, and most distinctive, hue in bad glass painting.