[See pages 10] and [268].
Here is the description of a Christian shrine by St. Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century)—"Whoso cometh unto some spot like this, where there is a monument of the just and a holy relic, his soul is gladdened by the magnificence of what he beholds, seeing a house as God's temple elaborated most gloriously, both in the magnitude of the structure, and the beauty of the surrounding ornament. There the artificer has fashioned wood into the shape of animals; and the stone-cutter has polished the slabs to the smoothness of silver; and the painter has introduced the flowers of his art, depicting and imaging the constancy of the martyrs, their resistance, their torments, the savage forms of their tyrants, their outrages, the blazing furnace and the most blessed end of the champion; the representation of Christ in human form presiding over the contest—all these things as it were in a book gifted with speech; shaping for us by means of colours, has he cunningly discoursed to us of the martyr's struggles, has made this temple glorious as some brilliant fertile mead. For the silent tracery on the walls has the art to discourse, and to aid most powerfully. And he who has arranged the mosaics has made this pavement on which we tread equal to a history." (From Father Mulroody's translation, in San Clemente, pp. 34, 35. St. Gregory wrote before A.D. 395.[200])
No doubt the richness of colour in these Byzantine mosaics inspired the taste for pictorial embellishment in the interiors of buildings, and the Comacines, not having Greek mosaicists at command, found an easier and quicker method of writing their scriptures on their walls—i.e. fresco. The first mention of frescoes is of those in the palace of Theodolinda, where her Lombards were portrayed on the walls. Several Lombard churches also retain signs of having been frescoed.
But if one desires to see what the early Christian Comacine could do in fresco, let him go to that interesting Roman church of San Clemente, where some excavations made in 1857 revealed the ancient fourth-century Basilica, almost complete under the present one, which dates from about the twelfth century. This ancient church was built by St. Clement, the third bishop of Rome, and in it Gregory the Great read his thirty-second and thirty-eighth homilies. From the subterranean remains, with their grand ancient marble pillars and the huge semi-circle of the tribune, masked and built in though they are by the foundations of the upper church, we judge that it was a far finer building than the one above. Its walls were moreover covered with frescoes, some of which are precisely similar in style to the ones at S. Piero a Grado, also said to date before the tenth century. The frescoes, which have been discovered on the subterranean walls, are, as will be seen by our illustrations of them, in three rows, which appear to be of three different eras—two certainly. The upper band of saints and martyrs are distinctly Byzantine in style, drawing, and colouring. They show the usual rows of immobile saints and martyrs in set robes with jewelled borders, which are seen in the mosaics of the Ravenna churches. These would, I believe, date from the fourth-century church, when the Roman builders were employing Byzantine decoration. The second row beneath this is of the more naturalistic Comacine school, and would probably date from Pope Hadrian's restoration in the eighth century. In these and the frescoes of S. Piero a Grado one gets the veritable link between the conventional Byzantine school and the naturalistic Renaissance in Tuscany. Here are no longer icons or abstract images of saints; the people are no longer rigid and set, but are full of action and expression, though both are imperfectly expressed. They are, in fact, real persons and their stories. The life of St. Clement is all told in scenes. There are even portraits of living people, such as Beno di Rapizo and his wife Maria, who "for love of the blessed Clement" caused the frescoes to be painted. Nor are their children, the boy Clement (puerulus Clemens) and little Atilia his sister, forgotten. They are veritable portraits, for the face of Beno in two different scenes is identical. The colouring, too, is unlike the Byzantine saints above. Those are rich with solid heavy tints; these are lighter, and more in the style of the early Sienese or Tuscan ones. Beneath this row of scenes are ornamental friezes, in which one recognizes Roman classical forms naturalized into floriated scrolls, and under these a line of panelling in fresco. One panel appears to be copied from the mosaic of the ceiling at the circular church of Sta. Costanza; another is suggestive of the emblematic circles and signs of the Catacombs. A third, the most interesting of all, is the one commemorating the building of the church to which we have before referred. Here stands Sisinius, and whether he be the hero of St. Clement's miracle, as Father Mulroody asserts, or not, he is certainly a Master architect standing in his toga, and wearing a Freemason's apron under it, directing his men, Albertus, Cosma, and Carvoncelle, in the moving of a column. The figures in this are so much more rude and out of drawing than the ones above, that they scarcely would seem to be by the same hands. I account for it by the fact that in representing a natural sketch from real life, the artist had no traditionary models to guide him, as he had for his saints and virgins, and consequently he found it difficult to depict his fellow-workmen in complicated attitudes. The art of the Catacombs has no affinity with these frescoes, which are of a more free and natural style, and the true ancestors of the Tuscan school of fresco-painting.
Frescoes of the 8th Century in the subterranean Church of S. Clemente, Rome, with portraits of the Patron Beno di Rapizo and his Family.
[See pages 10] and [268].
We might place these as the earliest revival of nature after the Byzantine conventional influence was withdrawn; the next link is to be seen in the church of S. Piero a Grado, three miles from Pisa, where are extant by far the finest specimens of Comacine fresco-painting. The church, which I have described in the chapter on the Carlovingian era, was built soon after the time of Pope Leo III. (795-816). The frescoes are said to date before A.D. 1000. Like those of St. Clement they are not Byzantine, and yet, though full of life and action, they have an Eastern air; they are not like the later Tuscan art, the colouring being lighter and the drawing of the figures different. The prevailing tint is a beautiful ethereal pale green, which is like nothing in Tuscan art, though Peruzzi produced a tint something like it in the sixteenth century. Standing at one end of the church and looking down the nave, one could imagine a Ravenna church, with its mosaics softened and toned down into frescoes. They are a valuable proof that among the Comacine Masters pictorial decoration was considered an integral part of a building. They told the articles of their creed in their sculptures outside, but they wrote the history of the church on the walls inside. The story of the church in the abstract is told in the line of popes above the arches, ending at Leo III.; the story of this church in particular is told in large scenes above them. Here is the church as it looked when built, and here is the ship of St. Peter cast ashore at Grado, and his preaching and baptizing, imprisonment, etc. In fact all his life still glows, though fading out on the south wall. The north wall is given to his death and miracles. Here is his crucifixion, near an obelisk on the Janicular Hill, and the beheading of his fellow-martyr St. Paul at the Tre Fontane, with the mysterious blood-red bird that drank his blood. Another scene shows the Pope Symmachus (A.D. 498) disinterring the bodies of the two Saints, and his vow of building S. John Lateran, and the last scene shows his consecration of that church. It is interesting to mark the Comacine influence in the drawing. The towers are Lombard towers, and the buildings all have round apses. The people who are not ecclesiastic or saints seem to be Longobardic, with reddish tunics, leather-thonged sandals, and long hair. As for the lions, which lie waiting before the cross of St. Peter, they are in the precise form of the crouching lions beneath a Comacine arch. The drawing of other beasts shows that the artists were less accustomed to them than to their traditional lions.