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.