From this it may be deduced that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries no indigenous Pisan school existed, and that the mediæval buildings were of the Lombard type. Certainly the old church of S. Pietro a Grado, three miles out of Pisa on the Leghorn road, which we have described, is a standing witness to the presence of the Comacines before this era. It still exists, the most perfect specimen extant of a Lombard tri-apsidal church. Not a shaft, not an archlet is wanting.
As to Aquileja and Venice, Selvatico's[126] theory is that the Friuli people, and those of Aquileja, being driven out in 450 by Attila, fled to Grado (another Grado near Venice), thence spread to Torcello and Murano, and then founded Venice. That they built the cathedrals on those islands, and founded the Veneto-Oriental school. Did this native school ever exist? asks Merzario, seeing that the church of Grado was built by artefici Franchi, which might mean Freemasons, or French builders, i.e. the Comacines under Charlemagne; and that those of Santa Fosca and Murano were, judging by their style, of the same origin?
The church of Torcello was rebuilt in the eleventh century by the Bishop Orso Orseolo, and if it comes into the question at all, would prove that the Lombard school had something to do with it then. In spite of these two opposing opinions, it is certain that architecture took a certain distinctive form in Venice; but it was a later development which occurred after the twelfth century, and with which the Greeks and Byzantines had little or nothing to do.
Selvatico, although the champion of the Veneto-Friuli theory, is constrained almost in spite of his own arguments to own that the Lombard architects had their part in early Venetian architecture, saying—"Although the prevalent architecture of Venice from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries consists of Byzantine and Roman elements, yet after A.D. 1000 another element mingled with it, which though partly the product of the two, nevertheless had in itself elements so original as to be truly national. This is the art which modern writers style Lombard, which, born first in Lombardy, diffused itself over the greater part of Italy, and then crossing the Alps expanded greatly in Northern Europe."[127]
The learned Domenico Salazari is at the head of the Siculo-Norman theory, but the influence of the mingling of Oriental and Saracenic architecture with the Norman and Lombard elements in Sicily are so well known, and so fully acknowledged, that it is useless to go over his prolix arguments.
It seems to me that each party is right as far as it goes. Venetian architecture has Oriental elements in it; the Tuscan Renaissance truly dates from Niccolò Pisano, and the Romanesque style was formed by the marriage of north and south in Sicily; but none of their advocates have got hold of the missing link in the development of each special school from the old classical styles. And that missing link, if anywhere, is to be looked for in the Comacines.
In the ninth century they went northward, and laid the seeds of the round-arched Norman architecture at Dijon, under S. Guglielmo; a seed which took root and developed. In the next century they appear to have planted the seed of French Gothic at Aix-la-Chapelle, and of German Gothic at Cologne and Spires, and these grew to be goodly trees. In the eleventh century they again met their brethren of the north in Sicily; and all worked together, adding to their own beauties those of the rich and varied Saracenic style—and the Romanesque style was thus formed.
The Venetian link dates about the same era. Fortunato, the Patriarch of Aquileja, called in the Comacines about A.D. 828, and their churches there show a groundwork of form and masonry quite Romano-Lombard, with an ornamentation of which it is difficult to say whether it be more Byzantine than Comacine, the two being so similar in conception, and the distinctive difference in technical work being at this distance of time not always distinguishable. Where the Byzantines worked in sandstone, the sharp edges of their precise cutting would have worn off during many centuries; and where the Comacines worked in marble, their marvellous knots and interlacings may look as clean-cut now as any time-worn Byzantine sculptures. In any case the union of Lombard and Byzantine in Venice was the forging of the link connecting Venetian art to the classic Roman.
The part the Comacines had in forging the connecting chain between the Tuscan Renaissance and the classic Roman, and the artistic pedigree of Niccolò Pisano, who is the first link in that branch of the threefold chain, will be traced in a future chapter. We must now inquire how the first Romano-Lombard style of the Comacines, from the sixth to the tenth centuries, became changed into the florid Romanesque, in which the same guild was building in all parts of Italy from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This development was possibly derived from both Northern and Southern sources.
The close connection of the Comacine or Lombard architects with the Patriarch of Aquileja in the seventh and eighth centuries brought them in touch with the Greek artists of the earlier period, from whom they learned much, especially in varying the plan of their circular churches, and in richness of ornamentation. Their later emigrations to the southern Lombard dukedoms, and their work in Sicily had a still greater effect on them. It seemed to break up their fixed traditions as a thaw breaks up ice. Before this time, every church must be of a fixed plan; every apse round; every space of wall headed by a gallery or arched brackets; every arch a pure half-circle on colonnettes. But the varied arches of the Oriental-Saracenic style influenced their fancy; they saw that art lay in variety, and learned that the pointed arch was as strong as the round one, the ogival arch more graceful. The Moorish arch never entirely took their fancy, though they sometimes gave a slight Moorish curve to their stilted arches.