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.
The Riccardi Palace, built for Lorenzo dei Medici.
(From a photograph by Giannini, Florence.)
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.