Földes Mária: Ornamentation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
Stone Guards The city is peopled with strange beings. Griffins sit squatting by the foot of stairs looking out for prey or maybe just for bits and pieces, while Medusa-heads, grown old together with the tympanums, bow tamely from the pediments, and light-bodied girls, columntrunked satyrs, and the indifferent “old hands” of antiquity keep vigil in doorways. Scythian warriors point out to their distant descendants safe spots to park their cars, monkeys with moonshine in their eyes are reincarnated in plinths whose plaster is peeling off. These are the lares, the Roman lords of olden times, the good spirits watching over the house. The lares came before the houses. The world that sent them was in no need of guards, for it is safety itself. The builders invited, evoked, cajoled or dragged away these beings from sundry types of Paradise, big and small, so that these creatures of safety would lend protection and authority to their buildings, which otherwise would have only been supported by the laws of statics, laws effective in a limited sphere. The lares, of course, do not rely for their strength on themselves, but draw it from the wished-for worlds from which they were taken and to which they refer. In the basilicas of early Christianity the metaphor of the spacious grove, created with the help of a peacock, a deer drinking from a well, a grapevine, or a slab of the heavenly turf placed at a focal point of the temple, conjured up for the onlooker the images of Paradise. The marble griffins and lions of Roman palaces, imported from far away, evoked the world of the Mediterranean, a world known only from hearsay, the world of the Roman Emperors, whose glory was yet to be restored. The putti of the Rococo were meant to bring back the idyllic days of Arcadian shepherds, while the Chinese birds and fish glittering in the frescos of the 18th century suggested the four thousand year old wisdom kept alive in the Orient. What is it that these lares draw on for their power? At the end of the last century, when they appeared on the facades of the city, the credibility of those desirable worlds had all but gone. The various kinds of Paradise had either disappeared or fallen, and there was 5
