Note 47 — Chapter II · THE COMACINES UNDER THE LONGOBARDS

Ricci (Dell' Architettura, etc.) tells us the spiral column was very anciently used in Asia, and that Rome did not adopt it till Hadrian's return from the East. Under the later Cæsars it became usual, but it fell into disuse in the rest of Italy. The Byzantines used it in some buildings, and in these two early Longobardic imitations of the East, we have a curious masonic link with the ancient traditions of Solomon's Temple, which Josephus tells us was adorned with spiral columns. It may be that they were old Roman columns carried up the mountain from some ruin, but I should rather take them as one of the first instances of the use of the spiral column by the Comacines, a form to which they were devoted in later times. There are endless instances of spiral colonnettes on the façades of Romanesque churches of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.