A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

CHAPTER VIII

THE GOTHIC SCULPTORS AND THE RISE OF
ITALIAN SCULPTURE AT PISA.
(1000 a.d. TO 1350 a.d.)

The period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of communal life in the Netherlands, Normandy, and Lombardy, saw sculpture at a lower ebb than at any time for 1200 years. Such buildings as Santa Sophia in the Eastern Empire and the basilicas of Ravenna in the Western, stand to witness that the artistic sense itself was still alive. But no great political or social force called forth the craftsmanship of the sculptor. As the Dark Ages drew to a close, however, a change came about. Mankind once more sought to find expression for its deepest imaginations and beliefs through sculptured marble and bronze.

We may roughly fix the date of the rebirth of sculpture at 1000 a.d. Scientific accuracy would perhaps demand references to Charlemagne. The historian of art, however, seeks causes of the greatest magnitude. He must point to vast eruptions of human energy and emotion, not to brick upon brick erections of paltry feelings, if he is to really account for the creation of a great art. We are, therefore, safe in starting from the feverish anxiety with which Christendom awaited the advent of the year 1000 after our Lord. The Millennium had expired. Satan was to be loosed. Men knew not what to expect. He who made a will or executed a deed started with such a phrase as “Seeing that the end of the world is at hand.” The very indefiniteness of the fears only served to increase the terror. Month after month crept by. Nothing untoward happened. At last the mystic year passed. The revulsion of feeling was immense, the immediate result being an enormous devotional impulse, the evidence of which remains to-day in the great number of ecclesiastical buildings erected in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Let us not be misunderstood. The year 1000 a.d. was not the cause of the new spirit. It simply marks the time. To understand why the men of these centuries instinctively lavished wealth and labour upon the cathedrals and abbeys and their sculptured decorations, we must picture the social and political state of Western Europe at the time.

During the years following the break up of the Empire hordes of heathen invaders had poured into the Roman world. The torrent was not stayed until the age of Charles the Great. The first result of the beating of this human tide upon the rocks of the old civilization had been a fund of nervous energy unequalled since the struggle with Carthage had produced vital force sufficient to enable Rome to conquer and rule the Western world. But this fund of energy needed concentration and direction. Politically, Western Europe in the eleventh century was a heterogeneous collection of feudal states. It was soon evident that the only common interests were those aroused by the belief in a common religious creed. In the midst of a general social chaos, the only really organized community was the Catholic Church. What wonder then that, in search for some sure resting-place, Christendom submitted itself to Rome? By the time of Gregory VII. (1073 a.d.) the occupant of the Chair of St. Peter had become all-powerful. Hobbes’ picture of the Papacy—the ghost of the Empire sitting crowned on its own grave—had been realized to the full. As the Festival at Olympia had been the rallying-point for the Greek world, so the meeting at Clermont, where the First Crusade was inaugurated, witnessed to the only unity Christendom could then imagine. This is why the artistic energies of Western Europe after 1000 a.d. followed channels suggested by the Roman Church.

THE GOTHIC SCULPTORS

For one reason and another, the first country to drag itself from the intellectual torpor which had affected Western Europe for hundreds of years was France. The commercial classes, particularly in the north-west, shook themselves free from the dominion of the feudal lords earlier than their brethren, say, in Northern Italy. As material wealth increased, the French bourgeoisie naturally sought for a means of expressing its pride in the communal life which it had created. But in doing so, it could not rid itself of the memory of the even deeper emotions aroused by the realization of the co-ordinating power of the Catholic Church. The cry, “A cathedral for Amiens, a city church for Rouen,” made much the same appeal to the imaginations of these Frenchmen as the idea of a Parthenon had made to the Athenians 1500 years earlier.

Previously the religious buildings had mostly been abbeys, and the property of the religious orders. Now the laity desired to do what they could. The finest French cathedrals were built by the great lay guilds. Their foundations were planted in the very centre of social and communal life. In this respect, the great Gothic churches of France differ markedly from those of our own island. Nôtre Dame, Bayeux, Chartres, Bourges, Rheims, and the rest are to be contrasted with such a typical English Cathedral as Lichfield, which nestles among the trees and makes, with the Close, a little world entirely apart from the clatter and chatter of the market square. Just because a French cathedral was so direct an expression of popular emotion, it was as a rule a less balanced artistic creation. The builders of Salisbury were not driven by the pricking desire to out-top the topmost which impelled the French Gothic architects and masons. But the French cathedral voiced more truly the inner feelings of the people to whose heart-burnings and soul-aspirations it was due.

Turning now to sculpture, the circumstance common to the Greek temple with its marbles and the French Gothic cathedral with its stone decorations, strikes us at once. In both cases, the prime impulse was civic pride. This is important. But it is even more necessary to realize the essential difference—that the Gothic cathedral owed even more to the inspiration of a great church and an all-powerful priesthood. At the very outset we come upon the fact that whereas the growth of Greek sculpture largely depended upon such a purely human feeling as the passion for physical beauty, sculpture in the Middle Ages was required to incarnate an entirely extra-mundane emotion—the craving for an all-ruling and ever-living deity. It was to this Coleridge referred when he said that “the principle of Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.” Just as the Doric temple—“Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime”—was an echo of the Greek spirit; so the Gothic cathedral, with its vast spaces and its complex schemes of columns, aisles and chapels, ministered to that mysticism which distinguished the Christian religion of Western Europe from the crystal clear faith of Ancient Greece.

Some will remember William Watson’s lines “Upon a prelude or a fugue of Bach.”

“Contentedly, with strictest strands confined, Sports in the Sun that oceanic mind; To leap their bourn these waves did never long, Or roll against the stars their rock-bound song.”

That is the Greek view. How different is the Gothic. Again we turn to William Watson—four lines upon “The Gothic Spire”:

“It soars like hearts of hapless men who dare To sue for gifts the gods refuse to allot; Who climb for ever toward they know not where, Baffled for ever by they know not what.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that no great sculpture was produced under the influence of the Gothic passion for mystic communion with the Unseen. No one now remembers the name of a single Gothic sculptor. Certainly, no one can recall a single statue of the period as a “joy for ever,”—the test of a work of art of the first order. May we not infer that the art by which the religious instinct most naturally finds expression is architecture, or, as experience has since shown, music?

The absence of sculpture of real beauty was not due to any lack of opportunity. There were thousands of stone workers. As had been the case with the Greek temples, the great Gothic cathedrals provided abundant opportunities for sculptural decoration. In France the façades of the great churches were often literally covered with carved reliefs, and rows upon rows of statues. The purely architectural work served merely as a background to one huge composition of statuary. The deeply recessed portals and the galleries and columns of the interior were equally designed to receive a profusion of sculptural decoration. The triple portal of the west front at Chartres contained some 720 figures, large and small, the tympanum in the centre depicting Our Lord in Glory. Attached to the pillars of the doorways were numerous large carvings representing the ancestors of Christ. The transept porches were decorated with a similar profusion of statuary.

But whereas the sculpture of the Parthenon not only served perfectly as an architectural decoration, but was also “a thing of beauty” in itself, it was otherwise with the plastic decoration of a Gothic cathedral. The Gothic architect had not the slightest scruple in sacrificing the beauty of any statue for the architectural effect as a whole. At times the Gothic sculptor’s deviations from nature were almost uncanny. In his choice of a subject, and in his method of representation, he was only concerned with the realistic presentation of the beliefs of the Roman Church. His task was to translate the mysteries of life and death into a language which the humblest worshipper could not misunderstand. The well-known alto-relievo in Bourges Cathedral affords a fine illustration of this phase of Gothic art. The scene represents the torturing of the souls of the damned. We are spared nothing. Everything is set down in all its naked horror. The Gothic sculptor had his virtues. One was that he always told his story clearly. He sought to suggest the ideals revealed by the Man Christ as he understood them. His only aim was to give form to the new emotions and thoughts which he believed arose from the teachings of the Church. Can we help admiring the grand sincerity with which he kept his aim ever in the foreground, and the wonderful fertility of his invention in presenting the ideas he had to portray?

GOTHIC PANEL

THE LAST JUDGMENT

A bas-relief from the porch of Bourges Cathedral

GIOVANNI PISANO

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

A panel from the pulpit of the Duomo at Pisa,
now in the Museo Civico, Pisa

Though the Gothic sculptor cannot be denied his meed of praise, an equal candour compels us to admit that these are not the virtues of a great artist. They are too utilitarian. Art lends its aid to make religious ideas more persuasive, but it is, properly, neither religious nor ethical. We realize this at once when we compare the Gothic ideal with that which actuated the Greek in the days of Phidias.

How altered are the circumstances under which the two schools worked. Let us catalogue them for the last time. The balance which the Greek preserved between emotion and intellect was no longer regarded as desirable. It was not even considered. Men had ceased to believe that a right judgment accepted the limitations to human endeavour set by the threescore years and ten of human life. Instead, there was an overmastering passion to enter into conscious relation with a mysterious power endowed with the faculty of controlling human destiny.

In place of the sunny myths of ancient Hellas, the Gothic sculptor drew upon the superstitious perversions of Scripture which his age accepted. The Church loved to dwell upon the wrath of God. The sculptor could only follow.

Whereas the Greek had realized to the full the beauty of the human body, and its possibilities as an emotional agent, the Gothic artist appealed to men who had no reverence for the human form, rather to those who despised it. Asceticism was rampant. Drapery was used, not to display the beauties of the human figure, but to hide them. The art of sculpture, which depends upon the perfectly developed human body and the balanced human mind and heart for all the more impressive notes in its song, could not flourish in such an atmosphere.

The differences between Northern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a.d. and Greece in the fifth century b.c. at once show why we must look elsewhere for a social state in which the art of the sculptor could find sustenance. As we should expect we find this in a country where Gothic architecture never achieved the brilliant success that attended it in France and England. We mean, of course, Italy.

The culture of Gothic architecture never bore transplanting from French to Italian soil satisfactorily. Many so-called Gothic cathedrals were erected. But the Italian architects always leant towards the Roman simplicity, and never multiplied the niches and columns in the way the French architect did. As a consequence the opportunities for marble and bronze decorations were greater than in the north, and the art of sculpture at once took a firmer position.

But the chief reason for the immediate growth of sculpture in Italy was not material but psychological. It depended not upon opportunity but upon the mental and emotional temper of those to whom it appealed. The Gothic architect in Italy did not adopt the methods by which his French brother appealed to the mystic instincts of his countrymen, simply because the Italian temperament was less eager to “dwell overmuch among desired illusions.” With a far fuller emotional and intellectual experience, the Italian did not feel, in the same degree, what Matthew Arnold has called “that passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.”

For many years the population of Northern Italy had been victimized by the continual invasions which the Holy Roman emperors made against the Pope. At first there were constant efforts to form leagues of townships to combat Emperor or Pope. But the cities could not put large bodies of fighters in the field, and their condition was deplorable. The great struggle between Henry IV. of Germany and the Papacy aided by Matilda and the Normans, brought matters to a head.

The remedy was found towards the end of the eleventh century, when each town discovered that it could best serve its interests by acting alone. In other words, the conception of a city-state was reached. During the struggle in which bishop was pitted against feudal lord, feudal lord against bishop, and both or either against Emperor or Pope, each city developed a political individuality. Genoa became distinguished from Pisa, and both from Milan in marked fashion. Nor was this all. It was soon realized that the bond of citizenship was an asset that could be used with magnificent effect. As had been the case in Greece, a city with a few thousand burghers found it could safely face a power apparently vastly stronger. The enthusiasm of every citizen was fired in a manner unequalled since a similar concatenation of circumstances had given Phidias and Praxiteles to the Ægean Peninsula. Finally, this civic ideal did not entail the jettisoning of a hundred human ambitions and emotions which were entirely foreign to the Roman Catholic Church.

A social philosophy began to arise in which human interests predominated. Here was the very condition for lack of which Gothic sculpture had been still-born.

THE PISANI

The city of Pisa is particularly identified with the rise of Italian sculpture. Near the town lay the marble mines of Carrara. The Crusades, by opening up the markets of the East and, particularly, Byzantium, had done much to increase its material prosperity. The citizens of Pisa, for instance, had contributed largely to the success of the second Crusade. Their reward for assistance in the capture of Jerusalem was a series of trading privileges extending over a great part of the East. Pisan banks and warehouses arose in every port. Material prosperity freed social life from many hampering conventions. Economic independence proved the first step towards the consciousness of intellectual liberty which was so striking a characteristic of the Renaissance. Pisa was only nominally a republic. Its aristocrats wielded power, and they realized, as Pisistratus had done in ancient Athens, that their tenure of authority was held at the price of magnificent schemes of public utility. The Cathedral was consecrated in 1118, and forty years later the Baptistery was finished. During this time the Republic, owing to its successful campaigns against Genoa and Lucca, became more and more powerful.

One of the principal results following the opening up of the Eastern world was a revelation of the grace and beauty of the sculpture of the ancients. The Pisans evinced a strong interest in the few works of antiquity that could be found. The merchants eagerly competed for one of the carved Roman sarcophagi which the Pisan fleets occasionally brought over from the East.

Under these influences, the sculptors who were engaged upon the decoration of Gothic cathedrals in Italy found themselves called upon to add a beauty to their work which was not required in North-west Europe. In their search for this beauty, the harmonious naturalism lacking in the plastic arts prior to the thirteenth century was attained. Craftsmen from Byzantium and architects and masons from the North came to such a town as Pisa to educate a band of local artists. They, too, drank deep at the well of Hellenic genius. The sculptors of Italy still worked under the inspiration of the Catholic Church. But, fired by the achievements of Greece, their work displayed a natural grace far in advance of the realistic fables in stone which the Northern artist fashioned or the symbolic pictures which the Byzantium craftsman produced. Niccola Pisano (1205-1278 a.d.) was the greatest Italian architect of his day and the wealth of his native town early furnished him with opportunities for exercising his skill both as an architect and as a sculptor. From Pisa, Niccola’s reputation spread through Italy. As a sculptor he was influenced strongly by Græco-Roman art. Being intended for Gothic buildings, his sculptural work has many of the characteristics of the French style, but it shows the clearest signs of classical feeling. It is true that he crowds the space he has to fill with a multitude of figures, where the taste of the Greek would have suggested a simpler scheme. His figures and drapery are heavy when compared with the graceful forms of the Hellenic artists. But all Niccola Pisano’s later work proves how thoroughly he appreciated, and how earnestly he strove to attain, the stately beauty that pervaded the art of Hellas.

Giovanni, a son of Niccola Pisano, worked between 1270 and 1330 a.d. Giovanni Pisano, like his father, was a brilliant architect. As a sculptor, however, he lacked Niccola’s sense of beauty, and he clung too closely to the fantastic exaggerations of the Gothic artists. He abandoned the ideal of tranquillity and self-restraint which his father had learnt from the Hellenic example. But his technical skill was so great and his efforts to give a passionate realization of the scriptural scenes were so sincere that Giovanni’s best work shows a force lacking in the sculptures of Niccola Pisano.

On the whole, the works of Giovanni prove that the influence of Niccola was not very potent. This seems to be due to the fact that to the time of his death the taste for sculpture was not general. It was rather eclectic. It appealed to few beyond the ranks of the aristocrats.

Moreover, though Niccola had realized that “art must anchor in nature, or be the sport of every breath of folly,” the conviction was not general. The feeling for the beauties of the natural world was only growing slowly. It came to the flood early in the thirteenth century, and found its most intense expression in the sermons of Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). It is idle to inquire whether the “First of the Friars” taught the world to look once more for the beauties of nature beneath the hard crudities of external phenomena. Certain it is that he was one

“Who heard the tale The low wind tells, Who read the rune Of moorland wells.”

NICCOLA PISANO

THE PULPIT AT PISA

Saint Francis never reached the modern conception of nature as the embodiment of the divine spirit such as is found in the poems of Wordsworth. It could not be said of him

“None inlier taught how near to earth is heaven, With what vast concords Nature’s harp is strung.”

But his passion for the beauties of nature added a new note to the prevalent interpretation of Scripture. Consciously or unconsciously, it led him to a far more human conception of the Godhead.

As a result of the preaching of St. Francis and that of his followers, all Italy clamoured for representations of the Christ and the Saints in the new manner. The demand was first satisfied by the painter Giotto (1266-1337). Under the influence of St. Francis, Giotto translated the new Christian thought and emotion into terms of flesh and blood. He pictured this living reality upon the walls of such a building as the Upper Church at Assisi. He did for Italy what Phidias and Polyclitus did for Greece when they gave material form to the Zeus and Hera of Homer.

The sculptor most closely identified with Giotto was Andrea Pisano (1270-1348). A pupil of Giovanni, Andrea carried the principles of sculpture enunciated by Niccola to Florence. The city, at the time, was one of the richest and most enlightened in Italy. It was, moreover, the centre from which the naturalism of Giotto was spreading. Andrea was always greatly influenced by his friend Giotto, and upon the latter’s death carried through the architectural works upon which he was engaged. But the words of Andrea show that Giotto’s influence upon sculpture was not entirely for good. For some time after the great painter’s death a distinctly pictorial character pervaded the works of the Italian sculptors. Andrea Pisano, for instance, himself spent many years in fashioning one of the great bronze doors of the Florentine Baptistery. This contains some of the finest bronze work in the world. Each panel is decorated with a scene from the life of John the Baptist and each tells its story simply and clearly. But it is at once obvious that the ideal at which Andrea was aiming was rather pictorial than sculptural. At his death sculpture was no longer on the free road of progress started by Niccola Pisano.

Our study of three centuries has therefore brought us to the following conclusion. After centuries of effacement and years of struggle, the art of sculpture has once more discovered the possibility of natural expression. But it is still hampered by its ancient alliance with sacerdotalism. This must be abandoned, and the sculptor must devote himself wholly and freely to Mother Nature, and Mother Nature’s most magnificent achievement—the human form. By no other means can a standard approaching the Hellenic be reached. We are now to learn how the bonds fashioned by the Roman Church were shaken off by the Italian sculptors of the fifteenth century.

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