Cosmati

Pavements and revetments were executed in Cosmatesque technique, columns were inlaid with fillets and bands, and immovable church furnishings like cathedras and ambones were similarly treated.

These are mainly altars and baldacchini, choir-screens, paschal candlesticks, ambones, tombs and the like, all enriched with sculpture and glass mosaic of great brilliance and decorative effect.

The equally magnificent cloisters of the Lateran, of about the same date, are very similar in design; both these triumphs of the sculptor-architects and mosaicists work have slender marble columns, twisted or straight, richly inlaid with bands of glass mosaic in delicate and brilliant patterns.

The richness of effect which the English or French architect obtained by elaborate and carefully worked mouldings was produced in Italy by the beauty of polished marbles and jewel-like mosaics; the details being mostly rather coarse and often carelessly executed.

[1] Ecclesiastical patronage in Rome dried up with the removal of the Papacy to Avignon in 1305, and by the time the curial court had returned and the ensuing schism had been settled a hundred years later, the craft tradition had lapsed.