• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2860 0

set new standards of excellence. More than fifty manuscripts of this work and 150 early printed editions survive, which indicates its wide circulation and popularity. In 1489 Erasmus, while still a student, wrote a shortened version of it, and he produced another digest for publication in 1498; this went into at least fifty editions. It is notable that both Valla and Erasmus referred to their opponents as “barbarians,” and it is a melancholy fact that, as humanism spread, especially in northern Europe, its language became more vituperative, provoking in turn harsh language from those thus classified, who held the leading positions in the church. Thus the cultural war intensified and became more vicious. We have dealt so far with its open, literary expression in manuscripts and printed books. It is now time to turn to its mute but visible images in bronze and stone, paint and plaster, bricks and mortar.

PART 3

THE ANATOMY OF RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE

Rarely in human history have the visual arts enjoyed such an intense and prolonged period of splendor as during the Renaissance. The riches are almost infinite indeed, and describing them presents special problems. A purely chronological approach is tedious and often unenlightening. On the other hand, to treat them by categories—sculpture, painting, architecture—overrides the fact that individual artists often crossed these boundaries, and most of them emerged from studios that practiced many of the arts. However, provided we bear this in mind, the categorical treatment is clearer, and it is right to begin with sculpture, for the Renaissance was concerned with the presentation of human reality, and sculpture with its three-dimensional evocation of human figures is the most direct in achieving this end.

The story of Renaissance sculpture begins with Nicola Pisano, who lived approximately between 1220 and 1284. He came from Apulia in the heel of Italy, but most of his working life was spent in Pisa, Bologna, Siena, Perugia and other central Italian towns. He was a product of the brilliant if precarious court culture created by Emperor Frederick II, known as stupor mundi, or the Wonder of the World. Frederick built palatial castles in southern Italy, patronized artists and craftsmen of all kinds, imported ideas and technology from the eastern Mediterranean and the Orient and, not least, sought to revive classical forms. Pisano was clearly trained in one of the emperor’s south Italian workshops, and he brought to Tuscany something new: the classical anxiety to represent the human body accurately, to show emotions not symbolically but as they are actually seen on human faces, to distinguish with infinite gradations between youth and age and to render men and women as living, breathing, individual creatures.

Nicola Pisano was, by any chronological criterion, a medieval artist. His first recorded work, the pulpit in the Pisa baptistry (1260), was carved two years after the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was complete and work was just beginning on Cologne Cathedral and the cloister of Westminster Abbey. But his spirit was already postmedieval. The marble reliefs in the Pisan pulpit show real human beings with faces full of care and anxiety. Pisano incorporates in his work the achievements of French Gothic sculpture, but his figures, fresh with life, are a whole epoch away from the elongated saints and angels on the west front of Chartres Cathedral, beautiful though they are, which remain symbolic and inanimate by comparison. Pisano’s Last Judgment, in marble relief from his pulpit in Siena Cathedral, from the late 1260s, is a medieval scene in conception, with ferocious devils torturing the damned. But the execution carries faint echoes of classical Greece: the embodied souls, whether saved or damned, emerge as individuals, not types; they have faces you would see in the Sienese streets, and bodies you can imagine walking or running—real, working bodies. Nicola’s son Giovanni Pisano (c. 1250–1320) pushed this humanizing process further: he has, for instance, three marble figures