Leader Scott

“ He, too, became famous in Venice, as did the two brothers Cristoforo and Antonio Mantegazza, who had just been trained under Jacopo da Tradate at Milan. Indeed, the network of this marvellous company of sculptor-builders is at this epoch interwoven in a most complicated manner between Milan, Certosa, Como, Monza, and Venice.
The façade of the Certosa forms precisely the same discord with the body of the building that the façade of Milan does, but here the Renaissance face is so rich and gorgeous that one almost forgives the discord. ”

“ The Italian architect, not being under the power of the edict of Leo, continued to carve his mythic animals, his symbolic birds and fishes, and even tried his hand at the first rude revival of the human figure in sculpture. His figures were disproportionate and mediæval in form,—what could one expect from a man of the Middle Ages just reawakening to the conception of art?—but they were full of fire and life. ”

“ So fully that all the different Italian styles, whose names are legion—being Lombard-Byzantine at Ravenna and Venice, Romanesque at Pisa and Lucca, Lombard-Gothic at Milan, Norman-Saracen in Sicily and the south,—are nothing more than the different developments in differing climates and ages, of the art of one powerful guild of sculptor-builders, who nursed the seed of Roman art on the border-land of the falling Roman Empire, and spread the growth in far-off countries. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There was Lorenzo degli Spazi di Laino in Val d'Intelvi, also of the same school, who brought one hundred and eighty-eight stone-carvers to the laborerium, and who won fame for the fine sculpture they produced. Can one wonder at the wealth of sculpture in and on the cathedral, when only two Magistri can furnish more than four hundred workmen between them? When one looks at the lavish marble work on the roof, the plurality of artists is well accounted for. ”

“ It must be remembered that the Magistri of the Comacine Guild were no longer of the same calibre as those mediæval men who built for the Longobards. Those were the products of an age of slavery and degeneration, who, lacking literature, clung to tradition, and could only act according to the small portion of intellectual light vouchsafed to the Dark Ages. They put stone and stone together, precisely as their forefathers had taught them. In form they clung to their ancient teacher, Vitruvius, and for their ornamentation to their ancient pagan superstitions, grafted on a mystical Christianity. ”

“ In attaching this link in its true place, the chain of Art History takes a new and changed aspect, and instead of several loose strands with here and there detached links, it becomes one continuous whole, from early Christian Rome to the Rome of Raphael and Michael Angelo.
The famous artists who formed the rise of the different schools of the Renaissance, were not each a separate genius inspired from within, but brethren of one Guild, whose education was identical, and whose teachers passed on to them what they received from their predecessors—the accumulated art-teaching of ages. ”

“ We need not then consider it improbable, if in the dark centuries when the Roman Empire was dying out, and its glorious temples and streets falling into ruin under the successive inroads of half-savage despoilers; when the arts and sciences were falling into disuse or being enslaved; and when no place was safe from persecution and warfare, the guild of the Architects should fly for safety to almost the only free spot in Italy ”

“ The thirteenth century was a time of immense development in art; what Niccolò and Giovanni di Pisa did for sculpture, Jacopo Tedesco and Arnolfo did for architecture. Jacopo was the first to introduce the pointed arch into Central Italy, at Assisi; Arnolfo further developed it in his cathedral at Florence, where the arches of the nave are round, and the windows pointed. After this era we have no more Romanesque—the reign of Italian Gothic has begun. ”

“ The ideas which the Lombard architects brought up from Sicily, when working there under the Normans, were the seeds of re-vivification, and caused a tremendous evolution in the art of the guild. They saw the decorative value of mosaic as it was used in the twisted Saracenic columns, and they were charmed by the rich use of sculpture in the graceful arches. From that time, every lodge throughout the land seemed to invent a new style peculiar to itself.
The Romans, with their traditions of classic mosaics, revived the art in Saracenic style as a means of decoration. ”

“ THE TUSCAN LINK I.—Pisa
The very mention of Pisa brings to our minds Niccolò Pisano, whose name stands in all art histories as the fountain-head of that Tuscan development of art which led to the Renaissance. But where was Niccolò Pisano trained and qualified for this high post of honour? A great architect and sculptor does not suddenly become famous and obtain important commissions without having some undeniable credentials. ”

“ In the buildings, which are so many that they have infected the whole world, you see the portals adorned with thin columns twisted like a vine, and so slight that they could not be supposed to support the weight. And then on their façades and other places they made a cursed mass of little tabernacles (archlets) one on the other, with many pyramids and points, and such foliage (here Vasari evidently has his eye on Pisa Baptistery) , that it seems impossible how they clung together; they seem made of paper, rather than of stone or marble. ”

“ Rome is almost as full of remains of what is now styled Comacine architecture, as it is of classic and pagan ruins, and they are nearly as deeply buried. Go where you will, and in the vestibules or crypts of churches, now of gaudy Renaissance style, you will find the sign and seal of the ancient guild. Investigate any church which has a Lombard tower—and they are many—and you will discover that the hands which built that many-windowed tower have left their mark on the church. ”

“ THE ANTELAMI SCHOOL.—PARMA
PADUA
The rise of the Romanesque is the stepping-stone to the Renaissance of Art in Italy. We need not enter at length into all the vexed questions of how this Renaissance began, and which school was the link between that and classic art, but a slight glance must be given to the subject. 173 Some make everything begin from Niccolò Pisano, as though he suddenly sprang ancestorless out of the darkness, a full-fledged artist. Some date the rise of art from the Byzantines in Aquileja and Venice; others again from the union of the Normans with the Saracens in Sicily. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Columns—which used to be composed of a base, shaft, and capital, in just proportions, supporting a well-adapted architrave or frieze more or less fitly adorned, and a cornice which only added beauty and strength—were exchanged for certain colonnettes, either too short or too slight, knotted, spiral, and grouped so as to torture the eye, and above the disproportioned and inharmonious abacus of the capitals were placed the arches, which in a good style should rest on the architrave. ”

“ The Palazzo Pubblico, at Perugia, with its noble Ringhiera and Loggia, might be taken as the culminating point of Romanesque civil building. Its principal doorway is a masterpiece of Comacine work. The Masters have set their sign of the lion beneath the column, but both lion and pillar are secularized; instead of the ecclesiastic column, here is a square pilaster with niches containing graceful figures of the civic virtues—justice, mercy, fortitude, charity, etc. In the tympanum of the arch stand three bishops, and over the architrave two other lions on brackets mark the spring of the arch. ”

“ The name of the Cosmati family has become generic for the peculiar chromatic sculpture of Rome in the twelfth century; the family were complete masters of the art. But though they may have taken the idea of its revival as a decorative aid to sculpture, it was by no means their invention, or even their monopoly. If you look at a Cosmati pillar or panel, and then at the floor of any Roman church, you will see that Cosmatesque decoration is but an adaptation of the old Roman opus Alexandrinum. And we have plenty of proof of the fact that other Magistri of the guild also practised it. ”

“ It has been said by Ruskin that the queer monsters sculptured on the early Longobard churches, such as Sant' Agostino at Milan, San Fedele at Como, and San Michele at Pavia, were the savage imaginings of the lately civilized Longobards, as seen through the medium of the sculptors employed by them. This is, however, proved not to be the case; animal symbolism was in those days an outward sign of Christianity, which, in a time when there was no literature, was to the unlettered masses a mystical religion represented to their minds in signs and parables. ”

“ There are also frequent mentions of Jacopo Fusina, and the two Solari, who form such a link between Milan and Venice. The Solari were the stock from which came the famous line of Lombardi, who may be almost called the makers of Venice.
To this little group of architects we owe the exquisite cloister of the Certosa, with its labyrinth of fairy white marble columns, and the ruddy beauty of ornamentation on terra-cotta arches. Our illustration shows the beauty of Campionese work at this era. ”

“ Mark's at Venice was entirely Byzantine, or Milan cathedral the work of a German architect. They were all the joint labours of the same brotherhood of artists, the plans made by the first Arch-master being modified a score of times as the centuries went on, and art developed. But in the great points the story of Art remains as it was. Certain masters still stand out as leaders and founders of schools, and every school had its own separate bias and special development of style; but Niccolò di Pisa's influence on future ages is not lessened by our finding out the masters who trained him ”

“ The arches between the doors are filled in with niches containing statues supported on black marble Corinthian columns.
All round the building above the base is a frieze of the real old animal myths and symbols, such as the Comacines of two or three centuries earlier delighted in. The march of the times had now substituted actual representations of 188 scriptural subjects, instead of mere symbols of dark mysteries, but the Magister could not all at once leave behind him the old emblems which had served his guild for centuries in the way of ornamentation. ”

“ It is unlucky for history that the original Freemasons, being a secret society, kept no archives. It is only after the twelfth century, when other art guilds were formed on the same system, but without the secrecy, that we get an insight into what had been, all the ages through, the management of the guild. At Siena, as we have seen, the painters seceded in the thirteenth century from the universal brotherhood, and founded their academy of painters, the sculptors following their lead. They, not being bound to secrecy, let the world know their statutes and their customs. ”

“ He was succeeded by his son, Magister Guiniforte, whose name is sometimes misspelt Boniforte. He was "a man of clear mind, exquisite sense and strong will; educated amidst grand ideas and grand things by a wise and talented father; he became Magister at twenty-two years of age, and worked under his father." When he was thirty-seven, he took Filarete's place, as chief architect of the Ospedale Maggiore at Milan, a work almost perfect in its harmonious beauty, and yet showing in every line its derivation from the civil edifices of the older Lombards. ”

“ Of all this crowd, two men rose to especial eminence: Magister Filippino degli Argani da Modena, and Giovanni Solari da Campione, who had a special connection with the domestic Gothic architecture of Venice. Filippino was son of Andrea degli Argani, architect to the Visconti. He showed so much talent for his father's profession that Duke Gian Galeazzo himself nominated him as a novice in the lodge of the guild. ”