These documents are very valuable apart from the fact they chronicle. They show how the guild was not only privileged by the reigning monarch, but that he was the active president of it. It explains all those queer words on Longobardic inscriptions, beginning—"In tempore Dominus Honorius Episcopus," "In tempore præsule Paschalis, etc.," showing that they point out the reigning king, pope, or patron bishop who was at the time president of the Great Guild. The name of this highest magnate is usually followed in these inscriptions by the Grand Master, soprastante or operaio of the special lodge. The universality of the guild is also shown; its president, the king, being at Naples, his "vice" at Rome.
The next place in which we see Arnolfo is in Rome, where he worked with his socio (fellow Freemason), Pietro, at the tabernacle of San Paolo fuori le mura. Here, with this ancestor of the Cosmati, Arnolfo learned his love of polychrome sculpture, which he afterwards adapted to the larger uses of architecture; for his grand Florentine Dome seems only a magnified inlaid casket. There is a beautiful piece of inlaid work in the Opera del Duomo which I believe to have been the pluteus or parapet of the tribune in Arnolfo's time. It is in the Cosmatesque work which Arnolfo often executed. That he was as apt a pupil of the Cosmatesque revival of the opus Alexandrinum as he had been of Niccolò's figure sculpture, and his father Jacopo's architecture, is evident by his tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Orvieto, where we next find him working in 1285.[238] The tomb is a beautiful mixture of Cosmatesque ornamentation with the legitimate sculpture which he had learned from Niccolò. The capitals of the spiral inlaid columns of the sarcophagus are of the true old Romano-Lombard form. In the simple grace of the recumbent figure we descry a forerunner of Donatello and Desiderio.
We have now traced Arnolfo's training through three or four of the chief lodges, and always under the best Masters. It is then no marvel that by 1294 his fame had risen so high that he was chosen as architect of the Duomo of Florence. He was well known to the Florentines, his master, Jacopo Tedesco, otherwise Lapo, having left Colle to settle in Florence, where he was engaged to build the Palace of the Podestà (Bargello). And this brings us to the vexed question of the parentage of Arnolfo.
Vasari says that Jacopo or Lapo, whom he calls "il Tedesco" (meaning Lombard architect), was the father of Arnolfo, and he gives this as a certain fact, understood to be the case by the world in general for two or three centuries past.
Milanesi, on the strength of the document quoted above, "Secum ducat Senas Arnolphum et Lapum suos discipulos," says that Lapo was only Arnolfo's contemporary and fellow-pupil.
Monument to Cardinal de Braye. By Magister Arnolfo.