It is interesting to compare Gruamons' work with that of the later sculptor of the façade of S. Bartolommeo, and note the rapid progress that art was making towards more perfect and natural form in sculpture. There are only twenty-two years between them, but the sculptor of S. Bartolommeo is far in advance of Gruamons in his representation of the human figure. It is said that Gruamons has left his sign in a portrait of himself on the doorway of S. Andrea, where a curiously negro-like head stands out from the middle of a column. It seems, however, to have acquired its blackness by being used through several centuries as a torch extinguisher at funerals.

Another of Gruamons' churches in Pistoja is that of S. Giovanni Evangelista Fuorcivitas, which is extremely interesting as showing a perfect specimen of the practicable Lombard gallery or outer ambulatory, which in two orders here surrounds the church. The building is entirely encrusted with black and white marble, mostly in alternate lines, but in some places inlaid in chequers. This fashion, which began in this very city of Pistoja, has an historical significance, and was introduced as a symbol of the peace between the factions of Bianchi and Neri, which so long harassed Pistoja. It was taken up afterwards by Siena and Orvieto, and in Florence and Prato, when their respective civic feuds were healed.

Gruamons, or Magister Buono, may have been the chief master of the laborerium at Pistoja with its accompanying Opera di S. Jacopo, which began to keep its registers in 1145. At any rate his family name was kept up in that lodge for more than a century. The Buoni followed the usual custom, and sought commissions in other towns. In 1206 we find one of them restoring and almost rebuilding the cathedral at Fiesole, which had been built in 1028, in the time of Bishop Jacopo Bavaro, but was menacing ruin two centuries later. On the sixth column of the nave, on the right, is inscribed—

Here even at this early date we have the Opera or administration under the direction of the dignitaries of the cathedral. The tower was built by a Maestro Michele in 1213. An inscription on the left of the apse tells us that the building of the tower cost seventy mancussi, a gold coin in use in the Middle Ages.[188] It is supposed that Maestro Buono copied his church from S. Miniato near Florence. The plan is nearly identical, and both have the same peculiarity of the omission of the narthex, or portico, which till this time had been an indispensable part of the ecclesiastic Basilica. It is true the Fiesole church is built of stone, and is simple in ornament, while S. Miniato is of marble and rich in decorations, but in plan and form the two are identical. In each case the same use has been made of the older buildings on the site by leaving them as crypts.

The first San Miniato church was built under Charlemagne, by Bishop Hildebrand in 774; the second was endowed by the Emperor Henry the Saint, and Saint Cunegonda his wife; both times the patrons were accustomed to employ the Comacine Masters. In San Miniato we see one of their masterpieces.

In the thirteenth century another distinguished scion of the Buono race came down to join the lodge at Pistoja. We have seen Giovanni Buono, or Zambono as he writes himself, at work at S. Antonio at Padua in 1264, together with Egidio, son of Magister Graci; Nicola, son of Giovanni; Ubertino, son of Lanfranco, etc. In 1265 Magister Bonus or Buono was capo-maestro and architect of the Duomo at Pistoja, and in 1266 he erected the tribune of S. Maria Nuova there, on the cornice of which he has carved—"A.D. MCCLXVI tempore Parisii Pagni[189] et Simones, Magister Bonus fecit hoc opus," i.e. A.D. 1266, in the time when Paris Pagni and Simones were operai, Magister Bonus executed this work.

In 1270 Buono was commissioned to make the façade of the church of S. Salvatore in the same energetic little town. The inscription on the pretty little façade is—

Here we get the names of two operai instead of one. It is evident that the lodge has increased since Gruamons was head of the laborerium, and Turrisianus head of the Opera. According to custom, one was an eminent Pistojese, and the other a Magister. We find Johannes Benvenuti working with Giovanni in several other cities.

The question we have now to answer is whether this Giovanni Buono, who was in Pistoja from 1265 to 1270, was the same man who worked at Padua in 1264, and was afterwards head of the lodge at Parma in 1280? An indication, if not a lateral proof, is found in studying who were his companions. At Pistoja in 1264, Nicola, son of Giovanni, was his assistant, and in 1270 Johannes Benvenuti was with him. At Parma in 1280 we find that Guido, Nicola, Bernardino, and Benvenuto were in the laborerium when he was chief architect. Here we have at least two of his companions, not including Guido, with him in the works of all three cities, which would go far to prove his identity.

The Buono family form a curious connection between Corneto Tarquinia and Pistoja. We have already spoken of the Ciborium at Corneto, sculptured by Johannes and Guitto (Guido) in 1168. The pulpit in the same church, and another at Alba Fucense, are both signed by Giovanni Buono and Andrea his brother, but date a century later than the Ciborium, i.e. precisely the time of our Giovanni Buono of Pistoja. The façade of the same church at Corneto Tarquinia is full of Comacine sculptures; and on the double-arched windows with the tesselated columns is an epigraph saying that the "inlaid work in porphyry, serpentine, and giallo antico" was done by Nicolao, son of Ranuccio. Now this must have been the Nicolao who worked under this same Giovanni Buono in 1280 at Parma, with a certain Guido and Johannes Benvenuti. Guido was evidently a kinsman of Giovanni Buono, for we find that in 1285 Albertus, son of Guido Buono, and Albertinus, son of Enrico Buono, were employed together in the sculptures at S. Pietro at Bologna.

In any case we have a long connection of the Buono family with the Opera di S. Jacopo at Pistoja, and shall find them still engaged in other important works at Pisa and Lucca, besides being chief architects at Parma and Padua, etc. Two centuries later their descendants were building fine Gothic works in Venice.

The Baptistery of Pistoja has been attributed to Andrea Pisano, but a document in the archives of the Opera di S. Jacopo not only shows who was the real architect, or rather head-master, but proves that it was done by a Magister Cellini of the Masonic Guild from the lodge at Siena, who became Grand Master of the lodge at Pistoja. It runs—"Et per Magistrum Cellinum qui est caput magistrorum edificantium Ecclesiam rotundam S. Joannis Baptistæ."[190] There also exists in the archives the contract made between the Opera (administrative council) and Magister Cellini on July 22, 1339, for the completion and ornamentation of the building which he had so far constructed. There is no mention of Andrea Pisano in either deed.

The Pistojan Baptistery is not a very pleasing building. There is something inharmonious in its proportions. It is of the usual octagonal form, but too high for its width; the horizontal lines of white and black marble still further detract from its beauty, and cut up the ornamentation.

On the whole the architect who wants to study Comacine churches cannot do so better than at Pistoja, where there is so much of the old work left. Besides the edifices we have already mentioned, are other two very interesting churches, S. Piero Maggiore and S. Paolo, although nothing but the outer shell of either is now remaining.[191] The architrave of S. Piero Maggiore has a very mediæval relief on it, representing Christ giving a huge key to St. Peter, while the Apostles and the Virgin stand in a row beside them. The capital of one pilaster has a man-faced lion, whose tail forms an interlaced knot. The other has upstanding volutes of a heavy kind of foliage. Lions lie beneath the spring of the arch, and winged griffins and other mystic animals are on brackets along the façade. I think the capitals and mystic beasts must have belonged to the first Longobardic church built by Ratpert, son of Guinichisius, in 748, as well as the lower part of the façade, which is certainly of the most ancient opus gallicum, of large smooth stones closely fitted. The architrave and the upper part, which consists of an arcade patched on in white and black marble, belong to Giovanni Buono's restoration in 1263. In old times a curious ceremony used to take place in this church, which belonged to the Convent of Benedictine nuns. When a new bishop took possession of the see, he was espoused (spiritually of course) to the abbess of this Order, with solemn rites and ceremonies.

S. Paolo was a priory church. This, too, had been built in 748 by the first Comacines under the Longobards, and evidences still remain that it was originally turned from east to west, the façade being then where the choir is now. It was rebuilt when S. Atto was bishop of the city in 1133, and besides a very pretty frontal, has a good specimen of the upper external gallery surrounding the church.

I will end my chapter on Pistoja with a mention of an interesting old MS. from the archives of the Opera di S. Jacopo, which, with Signor Macciò's aid, we found to be the marriage contract of a certain Maestro Jacopo Lapi. The bridegroom is named as Jacobus Dominus Lapus, fili Turdi, di Inghilberti, who wishes to contract marriage with Marchesana filia Sannutini, and to "live with her according to Longobardic law." The deed then goes on to specify the lands and possessions he bestows on his bride as a morgincap. This might be interesting in art history, if it could be proved whether the Jacopo Lapi were that pupil of Niccolò Pisano's who worked with him and Arnolfo at Siena in 1266.

In that case it gives the Jacopo Lapi's family an added interest as of Longobardic origin through his grandfather, Inghilbert. We further learn by the document that his great-grandmother's name was Molto-cara (very dear). This, taken together with the name Tordo (thrush) given to her son, proves how the nickname outweighed the family or baptismal name in mediæval times.

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—

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.

See page 250.

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.

CHAPTER V
CIVIL ARCHITECTURE OF THE ROMANESQUE ERA

The Comacines were always fine fortress builders from the early times, when they fortified not only their own island and city against the Goths, and against their civil foes at Milan, etc., but also other cities which had foes to keep off. Their towers and forts were so solid and strong that their builders were taken by Justinian to the East to build castles there, with the strong battlemented walls which aroused Procopius's admiration, and which he confesses were called Castelli, because that was the Italian name for them.

After the eleventh century, when the Communes were formed, the building of the fortress was less frequent, and the Communal Palace took its place. The guild was always gradual in its adoption of new styles, and the palace of the Podestà or the "Signoria" differed only in form, and not in style, from the older castle. There is the same solid masonry—either opus Gallicum of smoothly-hewn stones fitted with nicety, or opus Romanum of flat wide bricks welded together with cement till they are strong as a Roman wall. There are the same battlements and cornice of arches supported on brackets; and wherever a window is needed, high enough to be safe without an iron grating, it is invariably of the old Lombard form, with its two round arches enclosed in a larger one. There was the same pillared courtyard with its flight of steps to the upper floor. Jacopo Tedesco's Bargello at Florence, his Castle at Poppi, and his Palazzo Pubblico at Arezzo are the most beautiful examples of this style.

Arnolfo's Palazzo Vecchio, the Palazzo of the Commune at Siena, and the Palazzo Pubblico at Pistoja show the next step towards a less military style. There still remains much of the fortress, in the solidity and rigidity of the masonry below, and the battlemented lines above, but the tower is no longer a solid weapon of war; it becomes an airy ornamental shrine for a peaceful civic bell, that rings for the joys and sorrows of the people.

These buildings may stand as the fair examples of the work of the Masonic Guild for the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth and fifteenth the style changed gradually towards less rigid lines. The windows were widened and cusped, and the arches over the archlets of the windows became pointed; a gable with crockets placed above the windows still further lightened the effect, and emphasized the new Gothic influence. The ancient Palace of the Priors and Palazzo del Popolo, which stand close together at Todi, of which we give an illustration, show this progress in a very marked degree. There is just the difference between the two buildings that there lies between the palace of King Desiderius at S. Gemignano, and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. 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 door is surrounded with course upon course of beautiful mouldings, arabesques, and spirals rich in the extreme. Though exceptionally beautiful, yet if one compares this Palazzo Pubblico of Perugia with other public edifices of its time in Italy, the similarities are such that one cannot deny that a single influence must have dominated them all.

In the Palazzo Pubblico at Udine, which was later, being built in the fifteenth century by Giovanni Fontana of Melide (Master of Palladio) and Matteo his son, we get the link between these Romanesque civil buildings and the Venetian Gothic. The upper windows have still the Lombard columns, but the little arches are more ornately cusped and gothicized. The colonnade forming the Ringhiera is formed of decidedly pointed arches. There is in this a marked affinity to the Venetian architecture, and its origin accounts for it. The Fontanas were much employed at Venice, and worked with the Lombardi, to whom Venice is indebted for so much of her beautiful Gothic civil architecture. In cinquecento times there was a great call on the Masonic Guild for palaces. The republics had begun to fade into principalities, wealth and aristocracy again got the upper hand. The great churches were already built, and so to employ the many great Masters of architecture and sculpture whose families had for generations beautified Italian cities, the dominant families in them vied with each other in palace building.