The Cathedral Builders Part 16

By the ninth and tenth centuries the Irish cross had reached its full development. It was no longer a sign on a slab, but a beautiful upright sculptured cross, with a circle crowning it like a halo, and suggesting the eternity of the human cross of our Saviour. And here again the art is precisely that of the Italian sculptors. There was a cross of earlier date than either the cross of King Flami at Clonmacnoise, King's County, A.D. 904, or the cross of Mucreadach at Monasterboice, Co. Louth, A.D. 924, in the Roman Forum, of which the shape and ornaments are similar to both of them. The cross of SS.

Patrick and Columban at Kells has, too, all the marks of the Comacine work in the eighth and ninth centuries, as one sees it in the oldest churches at Como and Verona, at Toscanella and Spoleto. All these things being considered, I think Irish archaeologists would do well to work up the undoubted connection of the early Irish missionaries with Italy, and the influence their travels there had, not only on the religion, but the art of Ireland. They might discover whether St.

Columban, when King Agilulf sheltered him at Pavia, took from the artists then at work at the wondrous front of S. Michele, any ideas which he caused to be reproduced in the crosses placed by him to sanctify the open-air worship of his Irish converts; or whether he took a few monkish _Magistri_ skilled in sculpture from his monastery at Bobbio to carve those very crosses, and to build the first stone churches, that now lie in ruins at the feet of the rugged old towers.

FOOTNOTE:

[123] See Article on the Round Towers in _St. Peter's Magazine_ for May 1898.

BOOK III

ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTS

CHAPTER I

TRANSITION PERIOD

THE LODGES OF BERGAMO AND CREMONA

----+----+----------------------------+---------------------------------- 1. 1137 Magister Fredus or Built S. Maria Maggiore, Gufredus Bergamo.

2. 1212 M. Adam of Arogno Chief architect of Trent cathedral.

3. 1274 M. Jacobus Porrata of Made the wheel window at Como Cremona.

4. 1289 M. Bonino with Guglielmo Made the stairway on the da Campione north of Cremona cathedral.

5. 1329 M. Ugo or Ugone of Sculptured the tomb of Longhi Campione degli Alessandri at Bergamo.

6. 1340 M. Giovanni, son of Built the Baptistery and facade Ugone of S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo.

7. M. Antonio, son of Jacopo} da Castellazzo in } Worked under Giovanni di Ugo Val d'Intelvi } in building Bellano church.

8. M. Comolo, son of M. } Gufredo da Asteno } 9. M. Nicolino, son of } Giovanni } } sons of } Helped Giovanni di Ugone in 10. 1351 M. Antonio } Cattaneo } the facade at Bergamo.

11. M. Giovanni } of Campione} 12. M. Niccola, son of } Giovanni } Worked at the church of St.

13. M. Pergandi, another } Anthony of Padua in 1263.

son of Ugone } 14. 1360 M. Giovanni, son of Finished his father's work at Giovanni da Campione Bergamo.

THE ANTELAMI SCHOOL.--PARMA

------+----+-------------------------+--------------------------------- 1. 1178 Magister Benedetto da Pulpit of Parma cathedral Antelamo (1178). Baptistery of Parma (1196).

2 & 3. 1181 M. Martino and M. Otto Bono 4. 1256 M. Giorgio da Iesi Fermo cathedral (1227). Iesi (1237). Parma (1256).

5. 1280 M. Giovanni Bono da } Chief architect at Padua (1246), Bissone } at Parma (1280).

6. M. Guido } Worked with Giovanni Bono at } Padua and Pistoja.

7. M. Niccolao, son of } Giovanni } This group forms the link with 8. M. Bernardino } Pistoja and the Tuscan 9. M. Johannes Benvenuti } schools.

PADUA

------+----+-------------------------+-------------------------------- 1. Magister Graci Employed.

2. 1263 M. Egidio, son of M. } Graci } 3. M. Ubertino, son of } Lanfranco } All worked together at the 4. M. Nicola, son of } church of St. Anthony.

Giovanni } 5. M. Pergandi, son of } Ugone of Mantua } 6. { M. Zambono, or } { Giovanni } Father of M. Nicola. These 1264 { Bono da Bissone, near} two form the link with Parma.

{ Como } 7. 1264 M. Benedetto da Verona Worked at Padua with Zambono.

At Verona he is styled Benedetto da Antelamo.

Probably a descendant of the one at Parma.

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 cla.s.sic art, but a slight glance must be given to the subject. Some make everything begin from Niccol 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.

First, as to Pisa. There are no records or signs of a school of art indigenous to Pisa, before the building of the Duomo there. Both Morrona[124] and Ridolfi, the historians of the respective cities, have well searched the archives in both Pisa and Lucca, but can find no single reference to any native artist before the Duomo of Pisa was begun, or even of any Pisan who worked at that building as early as the eleventh century. All the first architects seem to have been imported. Morrona a.s.serts that when the cathedral was begun "the most famous _Masters_ (mark the word) from foreign (_stranieri_) parts, a.s.sembled together to give their work to the building." The word _stranieri_ is used by all old Italians not only as meaning foreigners, but Italians from other provinces. Ridolfi, on his part, affirms that at the beginning, the _Maestri di Como_ were the only ones employed in building the chief churches at Lucca; adding that--"Many of the works show certain symbols, monsters and foliage, which were always a special characteristic of the Comacines, and a sign of the Freemasonry founded and propagated by them."[125]

From this it may be deduced that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries no indigenous Pisan school existed, and that the mediaeval buildings were of the Lombard type. Certainly the old church of S.

Pietro a Grado, three miles out of Pisa on the Leghorn road, which we have described, is a standing witness to the presence of the Comacines before this era. It still exists, the most perfect specimen extant of a Lombard tri-apsidal church. Not a shaft, not an archlet is wanting.

As to Aquileja and Venice, Selvatico's[126] theory is that the Friuli people, and those of Aquileja, being driven out in 450 by Attila, fled to Grado (another Grado near Venice), thence spread to Torcello and Murano, and then founded Venice. That they built the cathedrals on those islands, and founded the Veneto-Oriental school. Did this native school ever exist? asks Merzario, seeing that the church of Grado was built by _artefici Franchi_, which might mean Freemasons, or French builders, _i.e._ the Comacines under Charlemagne; and that those of Santa Fosca and Murano were, judging by their style, of the same origin?

The church of Torcello was rebuilt in the eleventh century by the Bishop Orso Orseolo, and if it comes into the question at all, would prove that the Lombard school had something to do with it then. In spite of these two opposing opinions, it is certain that architecture took a certain distinctive form in Venice; but it was a later development which occurred after the twelfth century, and with which the Greeks and Byzantines had little or nothing to do.

Selvatico, although the champion of the Veneto-Friuli theory, is constrained almost in spite of his own arguments to own that the Lombard architects had their part in early Venetian architecture, saying--"Although the prevalent architecture of Venice from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries consists of Byzantine and Roman elements, yet after A.D. 1000 another element mingled with it, which though partly the product of the two, nevertheless had in itself elements so original as to be truly national. This is the art which modern writers style Lombard, which, born first in Lombardy, diffused itself over the greater part of Italy, and then crossing the Alps expanded greatly in Northern Europe."[127]

The learned Domenico Salazari is at the head of the Siculo-Norman theory, but the influence of the mingling of Oriental and Saracenic architecture with the Norman and Lombard elements in Sicily are so well known, and so fully acknowledged, that it is useless to go over his prolix arguments.

It seems to me that each party is right as far as it goes. Venetian architecture has Oriental elements in it; the Tuscan Renaissance truly dates from Niccol Pisano, and the Romanesque style was formed by the marriage of north and south in Sicily; but none of their advocates have got hold of the missing link in the development of each special school from the old cla.s.sical styles. And that missing link, if anywhere, is to be looked for in the Comacines.

In the ninth century they went northward, and laid the seeds of the round-arched Norman architecture at Dijon, under S. Guglielmo; a seed which took root and developed. In the next century they appear to have planted the seed of French Gothic at Aix-la-Chapelle, and of German Gothic at Cologne and Spires, and these grew to be goodly trees. In the eleventh century they again met their brethren of the north in Sicily; and all worked together, adding to their own beauties those of the rich and varied Saracenic style--and the Romanesque style was thus formed.

The Venetian link dates about the same era. Fortunato, the Patriarch of Aquileja, called in the Comacines about A.D. 828, and their churches there show a groundwork of form and masonry quite Romano-Lombard, with an ornamentation of which it is difficult to say whether it be more Byzantine than Comacine, the two being so similar in conception, and the distinctive difference in technical work being at this distance of time not always distinguishable. Where the Byzantines worked in sandstone, the sharp edges of their precise cutting would have worn off during many centuries; and where the Comacines worked in marble, their marvellous knots and interlacings may look as clean-cut now as any time-worn Byzantine sculptures. In any case the union of Lombard and Byzantine in Venice was the forging of the link connecting Venetian art to the cla.s.sic Roman.

The part the Comacines had in forging the connecting chain between the Tuscan Renaissance and the cla.s.sic Roman, and the artistic pedigree of Niccol Pisano, who is the first link in that branch of the threefold chain, will be traced in a future chapter. We must now inquire how the first Romano-Lombard style of the Comacines, from the sixth to the tenth centuries, became changed into the florid Romanesque, in which the same guild was building in all parts of Italy from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This development was possibly derived from both Northern and Southern sources.

The close connection of the Comacine or Lombard architects with the Patriarch of Aquileja in the seventh and eighth centuries brought them in touch with the Greek artists of the earlier period, from whom they learned much, especially in varying the plan of their circular churches, and in richness of ornamentation. Their later emigrations to the southern Lombard dukedoms, and their work in Sicily had a still greater effect on them. It seemed to break up their fixed traditions as a thaw breaks up ice. Before this time, every church must be of a fixed plan; every apse round; every s.p.a.ce of wall headed by a gallery or arched brackets; every arch a pure half-circle on colonnettes. But the varied arches of the Oriental-Saracenic style influenced their fancy; they saw that art lay in variety, and learned that the pointed arch was as strong as the round one, the ogival arch more graceful.

The Moorish arch never entirely took their fancy, though they sometimes gave a slight Moorish curve to their stilted arches.

It must be remembered that the _Magistri_ of the Comacine Guild were no longer of the same calibre as those mediaeval 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 superst.i.tions, grafted on a mystical Christianity. Yet, as we have seen, they so far improved on these, as to build several Basilican churches which might be called grand for the time, though still holding close to traditional forms.

The Comacine after A.D. 1000 was a man beginning to feel his intellect; the feudal system was breaking up, republics beginning to be established, schools were opened, and man began to feel himself no longer a va.s.sal bound hand and foot, but a human being who might use his own intellect for his own pleasure and good.

What wonder then, that the arts began to flourish, commerce to increase, and riches to accrue in this joyous freedom?

And what wonder that man's thankfulness for freedom first took the form of building churches for the glory of the G.o.d of the free?

The architects of the Masonic _loggie_ (lodges) who had held together through the troublous times, became alive with new enthusiasms. They compared their own buildings with others, and instead of varying the principles of Vitruvius, to suit early Christian demands as heretofore, they pa.s.sed on to new and freer lines. Instead of solid and rude strength, elegance of form and aspiring lines gave lightness and beauty.

The starting-point of the change was, of course, the adoption of the pointed arch, which at this time began to be subst.i.tuted for the circular one as giving greater strength with greater lightness.

"_Curvetur arcus ut fortior_," says an old chronicler of Subiaco.

According to their method of gradual development the Comacine Masters did not blindly throw themselves into new forms. They went cautiously, and first tried their acute arches in clerestories, and triforia, over naves supported by the old Lombard arches of _sesto intiero_, as we see in several churches of the Transition period. A little later they mixed the two inextricably, as in Florence cathedral, where the windows are pointed with Gothic tracery, the interior arches round and Roman in form.

"The early Lombard architecture," said Cesare Cantu,[128] "was not an order, nor a system, so much as a delirium. Balance and symmetry utterly disregarded, no harmony of composition or taste, shameful neglect in form proportion; to the perfect cla.s.sic design which satisfies the eye, they subst.i.tuted incoherent and useless parts, with frequently the weak placed to support the strong, in defiance of all laws of statics. 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. In fine, there was an endless _modanature_, ribs, reliefs, and windows of elongated form and walls of extraordinary height." In spite of Cantu's leanings to the cla.s.sic, this tirade shows the first indication of the change towards the Gothic, and it only proves that the Comacine Masters did not take up new forms borrowed entire from other nations, but a.s.similated what they saw in other places, gradually developing their style.