Now we see him striking Augustales, those curious imitations of Roman imperial money, bearing on one side an effigy crowned with laurels, with the epigraph AVG. IMP. ROM. and draped in the fashion of the cæsars; on the reverse an eagle with outspread wings with the epigraph FREDERICVS. Again he buys for a considerable sum (230 oz. of gold) an onyx cup and other curiosities. From Grotta Ferrata he takes away two bronzes, statues of a man and of a cow serving for a fountain, and carries them to Lucera. The church of St. Michael of Ravenna furnishes the monolithic columns he requires for his buildings at Palermo. Near Augusta in Sicily, he caused excavations to be made in the hope of discovering ancient remains. Once, it is true, yielding to urgent necessity he had several Roman monuments at Brindisi destroyed that he might use the materials in constructing a citadel. He tried just as he was departing for Palestine to make the town safe from any attacks, but political reasons outweighed his antiquarian scruples.
The work dreamed of by Frederick II as amateur was realised by his contemporary Nicholas of Pisa (1207?-1278) who, in the thirteenth century, held imitation of the antique as a principle, and used it as a mirror by which nature might be the more clearly shown. His attempt seems prodigious to us to-day; it supposes a power of initiative which Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Van Eyck have hardly equalled. Imitation with him was not confined to accessories—ornaments, costumes, armour—nor to types, nor to proportions of figures, which are all stumpy, as in the Roman sarcophagi of the decadence. The spirit of his work recalls ancient models.
“Nicholas,” says M. Gebhardt,[n] “in the pulpits of Pisa and Siena, and in the shrine of San Dominico at Bologna, recalls the traditions of a great art with a naïve gravity and assured taste. He is hardly a neo-Greek or a superstitious antiquary, but is imbued with the most generous principles of antique sculpture—the harmonious ordering of the scenes, the skilful employ of space where many persons move in a narrow frame, the majestic tranquillity of pose, the finely ordered draperies, the noble heads. But his eye and hand still express the fashion of primitive sculpture; the movements express awkward timidity, the faces are sometimes heavy. He gives an impression of Roman work at the end of the empire. Nicholas of Pisa (Niccolo Pisano), if he discovered and studied the Greek, did not renounce nature, and, in his best pieces, he has returned to a study of life. It is in this that he shows himself an intelligent disciple of the ancients. Apart from Nicholas of Pisa, the Italian masters each put their own personality in the antique; none were servile copyists, and it is Nicholas, the first and consequently the least learned, whose chisel has left the most instructive reminiscences.”
One of the most noted pupils and collaborators of Nicholas, Brother Guglielmo of Pisa (born about 1238, died after 1313), was inspired with like principles, but not so strongly. In the pulpit of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, he has succeeded better than his master, in reconciling pagan reminiscences with Christian ideas.
The historic sentiment is one of the distinctive traits of the school of Nicholas of Pisa. It has recourse not only to antique marbles as models of style, but to documents as well. Whilst, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, painters and sculptors gave the costume of the period to sacred characters, their predecessors of the thirteenth century tried to restore, aided by archæology, the costumes of Christ and his family, the apostles, martyrs, as absolutely as did the Renaissance champions two hundred years later. Fra Guglielmo has pushed these scruples very far; his apostles wear the toga, tunic, and sandals, and hold a rolled volume in the hand.
In the Descent of the Holy Ghost he seeks, moreover, faithfully to reproduce the types of the primitive church, above all in the figures of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. As with the sculptors of sarcophagi in Rome, Milan, and the south of France, there is a complete absence of nimbi, showing to what extent Nicholas of Pisa and his like disdained mediæval tradition, at least as regards types, costumes, and attributes. In the scene just mentioned one remarks also the grouping of the apostles. They are placed in two ranks, one behind the other, just as in a curious mosaic in the chapel of St. Aguilino (church of St. Lawrence at Milan). An arrangement differing very little is found in another bas-relief on the pulpit—that is, Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The women’s dresses deserve special mention. In the Annunciation and Visitation, Mary and Elizabeth have the head half covered with a fold of their mantle so as to expose the forehead and the greater part of the hair. They might be Roman matrons.
In his quality as a member of the order of St. Dominican, Fra Guglielmo had more than once to reprove the too pagan tendencies of his master. The position of another disciple of Nicholas, Arnolfo of Cambio (died in 1310), the architect of the dome of Florence, was not less delicate, but for other reasons. One is surprised to see this master, the promoter of a style departing so singularly from antique tradition, returning to the latter when he exchanges the builder’s compass for the sculptor’s chisel. Let us hasten to add that the departure is not so great as one might think. In his tomb of the cardinal of Braye at Orvieto, Arnolfo has known how to give the Virgin a serene majesty, a simplicity which does not lack grandeur, without pushing imitation as far as his master. He shows still more entire independence in the tabernacle of St. Paul beyond the walls, near Rome. If one did not know Arnolfo to have been Nicholas’ disciple, it would be difficult to imagine it in looking at this hybrid monument.[i]
Without attempting even to name the other lesser schools of sculpture and of architecture that were beginning to make their influence felt, let us turn to culminating artistic achievements of the epoch, as represented in the work of the great Florentines Cimabue and Giotto.