SCULPTURE.
Origin of Christian Sculpture.—Statues in Gold and Silver.—Traditions of Antique Art.—Sculpture in Ivory.—Iconoclasts.—Diptychs.—The highest Style of Sculpture follows the Phases of Architecture.—Cathedrals and Monasteries from the Year 1000.—Schools of Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy, Lorraine, &c.—German, English, Spanish, and Italian Schools.—Nicholas of Pisa and his Successors.—Position of French Sculpture in the Thirteenth Century.—Florentine Sculpture and Ghiberti.—French Sculptors from the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Century.
Fig. 272.—Altar of Castor (a Gallo-Roman Sculpture), discovered in 1711 under the Choir of Notre-Dame, Paris.
We would not assert that these works, pompously enumerated by Anastasius, the Librarian, corresponded in purity and elevation of style with the richness of the materials employed; for we know, on the contrary, that in order to comply with the wishes of the powerful emperor, artists were found who, by simple substitution of heads, attributes, or inscriptions, converted without any scruple a Jupiter into God the Father, or a Venus into a Virgin. The large cities were not as yet depopulated of the innumerable crowd of statues which adorned them; and it was only in provinces far from the metropolis that the images of the false gods were buried under the fragments of their overthrown temples ([Figs. 272] and [273]).
In fact, before the art had adopted, or rather created, the system of Christian symbolism, it was absolutely necessary to borrow the elements of its existence from the glorious materials of the past, and even to imitate the works of Pagan art.
In Greece more than elsewhere—and by Greece we include Constantinople—statuary preserved, under Constantino and his earliest successors, a certain degree of power which we might call original. The design still adhered to beautiful forms, and, in the arrangement of subjects, the principles of the ancients were for a long time applied, as if instinctively. Although artists no longer studied nature, they were, at all events, surrounded by excellent models, which guided them with somewhat imperious rule.
Fig. 273.—Altar of Jupiter Ceraunus (Gallo-Roman Sculpture), discovered in 1711, under the Choir of Notre-Dame, Paris.