CHAPTER IV

ROMANESQUE AND GOTHIC ORNAMENTATION

When the romantic style of building, which the Comacine Masters had imbibed in Sicily, came in, their serious set-by-rule building went out. The first use they made of their new ideas was to increase the richness of decoration, and this they did by the almost childish expedient of multiplying their old ornaments. Instead of one little pillared gallery on the top of a façade, they now put whole rows of galleries, or covered the fronts all over with them, as in Lucca, Pisa, and Arezzo. There is a very early instance of this in the church of Santa Maria at Ancona, of which we give an illustration. Here the network of arches are not real galleries, but only sculpturesque simulations; each arch is simply placed on the top of the other, without architrave or frieze. The doorway has the usual Comacine interlaced knots and no lions, so the façade may stand as an early sample of the transition into Romanesque, dating about the eleventh century.

The style shows a much further advance in Magister Marchionni's façade to the church of Santa Maria della Pieve at Arezzo, which is a fine sample of Romanesque. It was done in 1216. The façade has four rows of arches, one on the other, "growing small by degrees and beautifully less" as they ascend. Of all the hundred columns which support them, no two are alike. They are round, square, octagonal, sexagonal, pentagonal, multi-angular, fluted, twisted, grotesque, crooked, Byzantine, Corinthian, Ionic, Doric, Gothic, Egyptian, Babylonian, caryatid, black, green, white, striped, or inlaid. Some have single bases, a round on a square, or _vice versâ_, and so on _ad infinitum_. Yet with all this variety there is a certain unity of design, which bespeaks a multitude of Masters, each one using his own fancy in his particular part of the work, but one chief to whose general design the masters of the parts are subservient. Ruskin realized the beauty of this variety of idea, though he had not perceived that it came from a multitude of minds working together, when he said--"The more conspicuous the irregularities are, the greater the chance of its being a good style." And again--"The traceries, capitals, and other ornaments must be of perpetually varied designs."

The very same style and variety, showing a multiplex manufacture, is displayed by the cathedral, and the church of San Michele at Lucca, and the old church of San Michele in Borgo at Pisa. The two Lucca ones are extremely enriched by friezes of the symbolic animals above each row of arches. The cathedral and tower of Pisa show greater unity of conception.

The next great change was, that after the eleventh century, the interlaced work, or Solomon's knot, was no longer the secret sign of the Comacine work. They probably found that there was a limit even to the combinations of the interlaced line, or that it did not give enough relief. Certain it is, that on the rise of Romanesque architecture, the _intreccio_ faded away into mere mouldings, or got changed into foliaged scrolls for architraves; but the mystic knot with neither beginning nor end was no more used with special significance. The rounded sculpture of figures was everywhere replacing low relief, and the Comacine sign and seal of this epoch, was the Lion of Judah. From this time forward for the 400 years that Romanesque and Gothic architecture lasted, there is, I believe, scarcely a church built by the great Masonic Guild in which the Lion of Judah was not prominent.

My own observations have led me to the opinion that in Romanesque or Transition architecture, _i.e._ between A.D. 1000 and 1200, the lion is to be found between the columns and the arch--the arch resting upon it. In Italian Gothic, _i.e._ from A.D. 1200 to 1500, it is placed beneath the column. In either position its significance is evident. In the first, it points to Christ as the door of the Church. In the second, to Christ the pillar of faith springing from the tribe of Judah. Thus at Lucca, Pisa, and Arezzo, where the guild worked in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the lion is always above the column. In Verona, Como, Modena, and where Italian Gothic porches were added in the thirteenth century, and in Florence, Siena, Orvieto, where the cathedrals date from the fourteenth century, you find the lion beneath the column. And in minor works of sculpture there is the same difference. In the pulpit of Sant' Ambrogio at Milan, the lions are beneath the spring of the arches; in the pulpits of Niccolò Pisano at Siena and Guido di Como (thirteenth century) at Pistoja, they are beneath the column.

A most beautiful instance of the transition between Lombard and Romanesque is in the door of the church of San Giusto at Lucca, dating from the twelfth century. The architrave is a grand _intreccio_ of oak branches while the pilasters, which form the door-jambs, have richly-carved capitals of mixed acanthus leaves and Ionic volutes, with a mystic beast clinging to each. The arch superimposed on the architrave has a rich scroll of cherubs and foliage, and it rests on two huge lions. It is altogether a perfect Comacine design.

The next change in the sculpture of the Comacine Masters was the humanization of their sculpture. The rude old carvings of symbolical beasts no longer satisfied them. Christianity had now endured a thousand years and was understood, so that it was no longer needful to use parables and mystic signs. They still made the fronts of their churches Bibles in stone, as they had done before; only the Bible was in a language all could read, _i.e._ the sculptured story. From Adam and Eve to Christ and the Virgin, and even the least of the Saints, the Comacine put all Scripture upon his church. His Bible lay open that all might read.

The representation of the human figure was at first heavy and disproportionate, but as the centuries passed on, it grew in grace; and sculptors were able to express their conceptions more completely. The animal symbolism did not, however, entirely disappear. It is seen in every quaint fancy of the Gothic artist of the north, in every naïve bit of church ornamentation in the south; but it is no longer the object and end of design. It had become subservient; the human figure now took the first place.

In the earlier transition stage, even this actual representation was more or less allegorical. As an interesting instance of the allegorical nature of Comacine sculpture, we may take the relief of the Crucifixion in the cathedral at Parma (third chapel on the right), carved by Benedetto da Antelamo in 1178. In this almost mediæval relief, the artist has managed to put a symbolical history of the greatest events of his own times--the defeat of Barbarossa, the fall of Victor Antipope, the triumph of Pope Alexander III., the cessation of schism, and the gleams of coming peace on Italy. Around the cross where Christ hangs, he represents the Church as a symbolic personage waving the flag of victory; and the schismatic enemy with his banner broken. Every figure in the composition has its meaning, and the whole displays a thinking mind, even though the hand be still a little heavy and mediæval. That this is a veritable Comacine work the sculptor himself has chronicled. On the top of the relief is written in the Lombard Gothic characters--

"Anno milleno centeno septuageno Octavo scultor patravit M͠se secundo Antelami dictus scultor fuit, hic Benedictus."

An old chronicler of the sixteenth century tells us that this relief once ornamented an ambone or pulpit supported on four columns, which was destroyed in 1566.

Another very interesting work is the font for immersion in S. Frediano at Lucca, sculptured by Maestro Roberto in the twelfth century. The figures which surround it are as usual full of meaning but grotesque in proportion; though one can see in the draperies a foreshadowing of that return to classicality which Niccolò Pisano afterwards advanced towards perfection. We have here a queer representation of Adam and Eve, both clad in classical garments and standing by a conventional fig tree, out of which looks the head of the Eternal Father in a cloud like a medallion. Eve is clutching the tail of a monstrous serpent. In the next compartment the four Evangelists carry their emblems on their shoulders. St. Mark, with his lion, sits in a curule chair, and looks like a Roman Prefect, mediævalized. St. John has his eagle standing on a Roman altar beside him, while St. Matthew carries the child on his shoulder like a St. Christopher. As the work of a forerunner of Niccolò Pisano in the same brotherhood, the font is intensely interesting.

The cathedral at Beneventum (one of the Lombard dukedoms) has some beautiful Comacine arabesques on the pilasters of the great door. We give an illustration from one of them. The interlaced maze is formed by a conventional vine, in the branches of which are symbolical animals. Here is the Lamb of God, signed as divine and eternal by numberless circles all over it. The eagle, symbol of faith, is strangling sin in the form of a serpent; above, is a calf, emblem of the Christian, overcoming evil in the form of a bird of prey. In meaning, the intention is the same as the old sculptures on San Michele, executed six centuries previously; but speaking technically, sculpture as an art has advanced greatly. There is rich and clear relief, and intelligibility of design in this work.

Symonds,[192] speaking of this stage of art, says--"The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood (it was a childhood which grew and developed into virility, however), fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrevocable past. It is true indeed that unknown mediæval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful, as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The façades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in contest; and contemporaneously with Niccolò Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the north were adorning the façades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of loveliness. Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not arisen, and except in Italy the conditions were still wanting under which alone the plastic arts could attain independence." Here Symonds goes on to speak of Niccolò Pisano, as the fountain-head of sculpture.

And now we can no longer evade the knotty question of who and what Niccolò was, where did he arise from, and where was he trained in art?

There are always those conflicting documents which Milanesi found to be reconciled. The first, in the archives of the Opera di S. Jacopo at Pistoja, dated July 11, 1272, which runs--_Magister Nichola pisanus, filius Petri de_--(here is an illegible word which Ciampi reads as _Senis_[193]). He chose this reading because another document dated November 13, 1272, styles "Niccolò" Magister Nichola, quondam Petri de (Senis) Ser Blasii pisa ... (_hiatus_).

Milanesi, however, who found at Siena the contract for Niccolò's pulpit there, dated October 5, 1266, says the word _Senis_ should be read _Sancti_, for in the Sienese contract the words are plainly--_Magister Niccolus de parroccia ecclesie sancti Blasii de ponte de Pisis, etc. etc._ In another document also at Siena, in which Niccolò is commanded to send for his pupil Arnolfo to work with him, we get _Magistrum Nicholam de Apulia_. In two others of the next year, _Magister Niccholus olim Petri lapidum de Pisis_. Now all this is very puzzling, and yet being documentary it must all be true. We will put Siena entirely out of the question, the word proving to be a misreading of _Sancti_, so that instead of the second document meaning Niccolò son of the late Peter son of Ser Blasius or Biagio of Siena, it must read Niccolò son of Peter of the parish of St. Blasius at Pisa. We have then the two different nationalities of his father Pietro--Pisa and Apulia--to account for. Milanesi suggests that Apulia means a little place near Lucca called Puglia.

The further light we have found thrown on the peregrinations of _Magistri_ of the guild may assist us to reconcile the conflicting statements. It is certain, as we said before, that Niccolò Pisano was a _Magister_ of the guild, and being a man of genius he became one of its most important members. His membership was moreover hereditary; his father had been also a _Magister lapidum_. Now the Comacines had a lodge in Apulia, from the time of the Longobards, and traces of it still remained after 1100, in a small colony in the valley of Æterno, which preserved as a kind of monopoly the art of building.[194]

The church of S. Sofia at Beneventum, A.D. 788, and the monastery of S. Pietro were built by them, as well as the later cathedrals of Trani, Bari, and Ruvo. The latter still retains its ancient Lombard façade covered with figures of animals, the portal being flanked by columns surmounted by a fine rose window. When the Normans succeeded the Longobards and Saracens in Apulia, the Masonic Guild was still more busy there, and it was very probable that Pietro the sculptor worked in Apulia under the Norman dynasty, with many of his brethren. I am told that there is in Bari cathedral a pulpit of the same form as that by Niccolò, but of an earlier date. This is a significant proof of Niccolò's early training in Apulia, probably under his own father, as was the custom of the guild. It would also account for the Saracenic touch in his arches and ornamentation. The lions under the columns were used by the Masonic Guild a century before Niccolò's time, so it is evident they were not, as Ruskin and others suppose, borrowed from the Saracens by Niccolò. There is a most interesting pulpit of the older square form at Groppoli near Pistoja, dated 1194, with lions beneath the pillars. It offers one of the very early specimens of the sculptured scriptural story. The panels represent the "Nativity of Christ" and the "Flight into Egypt," both most naïvely designed. The square pulpit of Guido da Como in S. Bartolommeo at Pistoja is dated A.D. 1250, and shows the immense improvement art had made in those sixty years. In some ways Guido da Como quite equals Niccolò. He does not strain after the classic, but there is great and simple dignity, and even grace in his figures, some of which are almost worthy of Fra Angelico. It was ten years after Guido's lion-pillared pulpit was finished, that we find Niccolò--who had for some years been working at Pisa, where he was then domiciled--sculpturing his famous pulpit there, and though altering the form from square to octagon, using the same symbolism, and in many ways the same treatment of his subject, as Guido had done before him. It would be a suggestive proof of the same influence in training, to compare the panels representing the Nativity, in the three pulpits. The Lombard one at Groppoli, Guido da Como's at Pistoja, and Niccolò's at Pisa, and one might add a fourth, _i.e._ Giovanni Pisano's pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja, which is in some respects an advance on his father's design, although it is evidently not only inspired, but almost copied from it. There are in all four, the same kind of _lectis_ for bed, the same cows, out of perspective, high up in the background, and in the two last the same treatment of drapery. In some ways, however, Niccolò has passed far beyond Guido. While Guido followed his forefathers' traditions, Niccolò had been first revelling in the richness of Saracenic types in Apulia, and then living among the classic spoils of Pisa, where Diotisalvi had worked before him.

His school at Pisa inaugurated a revival which was to change art for all the world. Yet it was only a step and not a sudden leap. He was no ancestorless genius springing from darkness and chaos, but a link in the chain of art from which in him a new strand departed, leading towards Donatello and Ghiberti. He took the forms of his sect, but improved and freed them; he held to the traditional symbolism of his guild, but classicized and enriched it. His greatest advance was in the modelling of the human figure, and here his classic models helped him. One suspects that he depended much on those models, for where he had no antique to copy from, he degenerated into the mediævalism of his fraternity. The mixture of the two styles is very apparent in the different panels of his pulpit, some of which look as if they had come from Antonine's column, while others are heavier and less graceful by far than Guido da Como's simple natural figures. The fact was, that in his time the whole guild was developing under the freer conditions of art, and Niccolò was one of its leading masters, and endowed with especial talent.

With him the Romanesque period closes, and the Italian Gothic begins. Led by him the Comacines in Tuscany left the rude, distorted images and meaningless monsters behind, and marched on towards the perfection of sculpture of the human form as shown by Donatello and Michael Angelo.

Among the Comacines in Lombardy the same change was in progress. Jacopo Porrata, working at nearly the same time, carved the life-like prophets and bas-relief on the façade of the cathedral of Cremona, which bears the legend, "Magister Jacobus Porrata de Cumis fecit hanc rotam MCCLXXIIII."

Antonio de Frix of Como, working in concert with Meo di Checco, carved the beautiful roof of the Duomo at Ferrara, while other Masters were sculpturing sacred stories on pulpits and doorways, vestibules and decorations in many a church which their forerunners had built.

With the development of the Gothic, the guild again changed the style of their ornamentation.

The pointed gable over the circular arch was one of the first signs of this change. You see it in Siena, Orvieto, Florence, and the fourteenth-century porches in Lombardy.

The gable gave an opening for statuary, floriated crockets, and ornate pinnacles; the pointed arch opened a way to beautiful tracery; the upward shaft and pilaster afforded space for the ornate tabernacle or saint-filled niche; for the sculptor-architect never let an inch go plain which could be effectively sculptured.

Between the solid Lombard round arch and the pointed traceried one stands the cusping of the circular arch. Ruskin credits Niccolò Pisano also with this; saying grandiloquently that "in the five cusped arches of Niccolò's pulpit you see the first Gothic Christian architecture ... the change, in a word, for all Europe, from the Parthenon to Amiens cathedral. For Italy it means the rise of her Gothic dynasty--it means the Duomo of Milan instead of the Temple of Paestum."[195] This is very poetic, but it will not bear analysis. The cusps of Niccolò's arches were by no means the first to be seen in Italy; we find them in several churches of the twelfth century; and as for Amiens cathedral, that was nearly completed when Niccolò's pulpit was carved.

The cusping of the round arch came up from the south; it was suggested to the Comacines by the Saracenic architecture, as a variety on their usual twin archlets under a round arch, and was used some time before they adopted the pointed arch.

The first real Italian step to the pointed Gothic began at Assisi, in the hands of Jacopo il Tedesco, and his fellow-countryman, Fra Filippo di Campello, or Campiglione. Jacopo stands to Italian Gothic architecture in the same place as Niccolò Pisano stands to Renaissance sculpture. In Italy, the land of classic Rome, true Gothic never developed in the form in which we see it further north. Her finest buildings retained in parts the older forms, and with the humanism of the classic revival of literature, a classic revival of architecture also took place. The Gothic style in Italy was strangled in its infancy by Bramante and Michael Angelo. Even Milan, though a glorious Gothic building, was masked and disfigured by a Renaissance front, with its straight lines and geometric pediments.

The Germans and French, taking the germ from Italy, developed it magnificently; and it is fortunate that they had broken the bonds of the old Masonic brotherhood, and nationalized themselves and their art in time to keep their Gothic forms pure.

If we should attempt to particularize examples of Italian Gothic ornamentation, volumes would not be enough. We will be content with a few instances of sculpture by the Lombard guild at this epoch.

Some beautiful illustrations of their allegorical style are to be seen in studying the capitals of the colonnade of the Ducal Palace at Venice, some of which were by Bartolommeo Buono, son of the fifteenth-century Zambono or Giovanni Buono. We give an illustration of one with allegorical representations of the classical goddesses, Venus, Minerva, and Juno, throned in acanthus leaves. Minerva looks like a mediæval school-mistress as she teaches Hebe and the Loves, from a ponderous tome. The famous Adam and Eve capital, of which Ruskin writes so eloquently, was probably by the same hand. Bartolommeo's best carving was in his "Porta della Carta," the door of the Grand Ducal Palace, next San Marco, which is rich in the extreme, and is signed on the architrave "Opus Bartolommei."

Bartolommeo's father, Giovanni Buono, was the head architect of the beautiful "Ca' d'oro," and here the richness of decorative sculpture under florid Gothic forms reaches its height.

The family Buono came from Campione, and I think it probable that this was the same Bartolommeo da Campione whose name is on several of the Gothic capitals of Milan cathedral. We give an illustration of one of them, which is extremely rich in statues and pinnacles.

The rapid march from the early pointed towards florid Gothic sculpture, is evidenced in a remarkable manner by the tombs of the Scaligers in Verona. The monument to Mastino II., who died in 1351, by Magister Porino or Perino, is only a quarter of a century previous to that of Can Grande, who died in 1375, which was by Bonino da Campione.[196] Yet between the two there lies an immense development of style. In Perino's work there are the seeds of all the forms in Bonino's, but in one the Gothic style is undeveloped, in the other it is in full flower.

Perino has his columns; his cusped pointed arches with high gables above them; his tabernacles, pinnacles, and pyramidal roof, with an equestrian statue on the summit; but his lines are simple, direct, and unbroken, though enriched here and there with reliefs and figures. In Bonino's the columns are richly carved, the arches lavishly cusped, the tympanum filled with sculptured medallions. The tabernacles are richer and more emphatically Gothic in their lengthened lines and multiplied pinnacles. The figures even have grown into more true proportions, and are elongated into gracefulness. Every inch of the whole design is foliated and rich to a degree--as beautiful a bit of Gothic sculpture as any German or English cathedral can show, but yet the work of pure Italians, and men of the Comacine Guild.

The sepulchral monument of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the Certosa of Pavia is of an entirely different style to those of the Scaligers. It is principally the work of Gio. Antonio Amedeo, and has the same ornate Renaissance style as the façade of the Certosa in which he assisted. An arched base contains the sarcophagus, on which rests the beautiful and dignified figure of the Duke, guarded at head and foot by classic angels. Above this is a statue of the Virgin and Child in a central niche, flanked by reliefs of scenes from the life of the Duke. The whole surface of the marble is covered with sculpture, but of a style removed as far as the poles from the work of the Comacine Guild, 800 years back. There all was life and _naïveté_, here all is classical decorum and convention. Pilasters covered with armour and coats of mail like a Roman trophy, friezes of set garlands and shields like a Roman pediment, vases with conventional plants rising stiffly out of them. The severe architectural lines are straight and unbroken; here are no Gothic pinnacles and graceful shrines, no ornamental gables or pyramids, only the plain arch and pediment classically set and correct. The Italians had revived the Roman; and the Renaissance style was the result. Comacine art began with true Roman, and ended with a return to a false classicism, that with rule and line crushed out the life of the rich Gothic floriation.

FOOTNOTES:

[192] Symonds, _The Renaissance, etc. Fine Arts_, chap. iii. p. 77.

[193] Ciampi, _Notizie inedite della Sagrestia Pistojese_. Firenze.

[194] Merzario, _I Maestri Comacini_, Vol. I. chap. v. p. 177.

[195] Ruskin, _Val d'Arno_, p. 17.

[196] This must have been another scion of the Buoni family, probably a small man, and therefore called "Little Buono."