The full discussion of these points is rendered impossible by the want of contemporary information, and each student must, therefore, remain contented with his own hypothesis. Yet something can be said with regard to the Ravello pulpit that plays so important a part in the argument of the learned historians of Italian painting. Unless a strong similarity between it and Pisano's pulpits can be proved, their hypothesis carries with it no persuasion.
The pulpit in the cathedral of Ravello is formed like an ambo of the antique type. That is to say, it is a long parallelogram with flat sides, raised upon pillars, and approached by a flight of steps. These steps are enclosed within richly-ornamented walls, and stand distinct from the pulpit; a short bridge connects the two. The six pillars supporting the ambo itself are slender twisted columns with classic capitals. Three rest on lions, three on lionesses, admirably carved in different attitudes. A small projection on the north side of the pulpit sustains an eagle standing on a pillar, and spreading out his wings to bear an open book. On the arch over the entrance to the staircase projects the head of Sigelgaita, wife of Niccola Rufolo, the donor of the pulpit to the church, sculptured in the style of the Roman decadence, between two profile medallions in low relief.[[411]] The material of the whole is fair white marble, enriched with mosaics, and wrought into beautiful scroll-work of acanthus leaves and other Romanesque adornments. An inscription, "Ego Magister Nicolaus de Bartholomeo de Fogia Marmorarius hoc opus feci;" and another, "Lapsis millenis bis centum bisque trigenis XPI. bissenis annis ab origine plenis," indicate the artist's name and the date of the work.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could trace such a resemblance between this rectangular ambo and the hexagonal structure in the Pisan Baptistery as would justify them in asserting both to be the products of the same school. The pulpit of Niccola da Foggia does not materially differ from other ambones in Italy—from several, for instance, in Amalfi and Ravello; while the distinctive features of Niccola Pisano's work—the combination of classically studied bas-reliefs with Gothic principles of construction, the feeling for artistic unity in the composition of groups, the mastery over plastic form, and the detached allegorical figures—are noticeable only by their total absence from it. What is left by way of similarity is a sculpturesque refinement in Sigelgaita's portrait, not unworthy of Pisano's own chisel. This, however, is but a slender point whereon to base so large a pyramid of pure conjecture. Surely we must look elsewhere than at Ravello or at Foggia for the origin of Niccola Pisano.
Why then should we reject tradition in this instance? Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle reply; because the sculpture of no Tuscan city before his period is good enough to have led up to him. Yet this may be contested; and at all events it will not be easy to prove from the Ravello head of Sigelgaita that a more advanced school existed in the south. The fact is that the art of the stone-carvers or marmorarii had never entirely died out since the days of Roman greatness; nor was Niccola without respectable predecessors in the very town of Lucca, where he produced the first masterpiece of modern sculpture. The circular font of S. Frediano, for example, carved with figures in high relief by a certain Robertus of the twelfth century, combines the Romanesque mannerism with the naïveté of mediæval fancy. I might point in particular to two knights seated on one horse in what I take to be the company of Pharaoh crossing the Red Sea, as an instance of a successful attempt to escape from the formalism of a decayed style. At the same time the general effect of the embossed work of this font is fine; nor do we fail to perceive that the artist retained some portion of the classic feeling for grandiose and monumental composition. Far less noteworthy, yet still not utterly despicable, is the bas-relief of Biduinus over the side-door of S. Salvatore at Lucca. What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to the style of these continuators of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with nature. It is just at this point that the old tale about the sarcophagus of the Countess Beatrice conveys not only the letter but the spirit of the fact. Niccola's genius, no less vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto, infused into the hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors true nature and true art. Between the bas-relief of S. Salvatore and the bas-relief over the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, there is indeed a broad gulf, yet such as might have been passed at one bound by a master into whose soul the beauty of a fragment of Greek art had sunk, and who had received at his birth the gift of a creative genius.
FOOTNOTES:
History of Painting in Italy, vol. i. chap. iv.