also his own satiric and pessimistic views of life, of nature ever at war with itself, and at the same time beginning to subordinate spiritual ideas to a desire for decorative effect. The attempts seen here at representing human figures are still of the rudest and most primitive, as for example the figure—perhaps Salome—dancing, while another plays the lyre, on a capital to the left of the middle door, the Adam and Eve (?) on either side of the Tree on one of the middle capitals of the narthex, the huntsman standing triumphant above a crowd of horned beasts—symbolic of the victory of the human over the animal nature. But many of the capitals are purely fanciful and decorative; the grotesque creatures writhe into graceful and symmetric designs, and that sort of flat-ribbed cord that appears so constantly, and in its endless windings is emblematic of eternity, is led into graceful curves and develops into leaves and stems which, growing bolder and freer, become finally beautiful foliage designs with masks and grotesques that seem to herald the Renaissance. This more advanced decoration is probably thirteenth century. Some fragments of the more archaic ornament, especially round the middle doorway, which has the appearance of being pieced together in places, seem to be survivals of an earlier existence of the church, which were embodied in the twelfth century reconstruction—the symbolic Lion of St. Mark, for example, and the Abbot’s Cross on a column on the right hand, which belongs perhaps to the period of the rebuilding for the monks. The name of _Adam Magister_, inscribed round a slender column on the left of the door, upside down, is no doubt that of the architect or sculptor of the present or some former phase of the building. [Illustration: CAPITAL IN ATRIUM OF ST. AMBROGIO. ]