BOOK I.

THE ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTORS.

VOL. I.

B

CHAPTER I.

NICCOLA PISANO.

IT

between

is and as

T is somewhat difficult to realise, while treading the dull and Contrast silent streets of Pisa, or traversing the broad plain which Pisa as it separates the city from the sea, that in the eleventh century, it was. when those lonely buildings, which now form her chief attraction, were erected, Pisa was chief among the Ghibelline cities of Italy, a seaport, and one of the principal channels through which Oriental produce flowed into Europe; that she was mistress of several islands in the Mediterranean, whose waves often bore her gallant sons to battle with their rivals the Genoese; and that her now depopulated streets were daily filled with a motley crowd, quaintly described by an old chronicler as 'Pagans, Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea.'1

If we would find something to guide our imagination to a still earlier period, we must inspect the antique sarcophagi which line the spacious corridors of her Campo Santo; some of which have, doubtless, been in her possession since the days when she flourished as an important colony of imperial Rome, while others were brought from the East, from Sicily, and various parts of Italy

1

"Qui pergit Pisas videt illic monstra marina.

Hæc urbs Paganis, Turchis, Libycis, quoque Parthis

Sordida; Chaldæi sua lustrant monia tetri.'

(Denizone, Vita Comm. Mathildis, apud Muratori, lib. i. ch. xx.) The monk Denizone, who wrote these lines, launched a torrent of abuse upon Pisa, because she would not allow his liege lady, the Countess Matilda, to be buried at Canossa (L. Tosti, Life of the Countess Matilda, lib. iii. p. 167).

Influence of the

art.

during the middle ages. When these sarcophagi decorated the exterior of the Duomo during the eleventh, twelfth, and greater part of the thirteenth century, they served as tombs for distinguished Pisans, and for illustrious foreigners deceased at Pisa,' and thus linked together her Roman and mediaval existence; and when they attracted the notice of Niccola Pisano, who through study of the bas-reliefs upon them was awakened to a full comprehension of the fallen state of sculpture in his day, and enabled to raise it again to a pitch of excellence unattained since the decline of the Roman Empire, they became the instruments of the regeneration of sculpture in Italy.

The development of art in the thirteenth century was so times upon strikingly influenced by the great struggle unceasingly carried on between the Imperial and Papal powers, that we may well pause, before entering upon the life of Niccola Pisano, to say a few words about it and its leaders, and to trace the connection between them and the art of their time. There were great men on both sides; great tyrants, such as Frederic II. and Ezzelino of Padua ; great popes, such as Innocent IV. and Urban IV.; great saints, such as SS. Francis and Dominic; who, though they represented antagonistic principles, equally aided the development of art; for while the tyrants needed fortresses, and palaces scarcely less calculated for purposes of defence, the popes needed convents in which the armies of monks whom they enlisted to fight against

1 Pisa, the ancient Pisa, originally a Pelasgic town, was made a Latin colony 180 B.C., and again colonised in the time of Augustus. As in the first century of the Christian era she was praised by Strabo, 'propter saxorum opera,' it is not impossible that some of these sarcophagi may have been sculptured within her walls.

2 Such as the Countess Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda, in 1187; Pope Gregory VIII., who died at Pisa in the same year; the great Burgundian in 1193; and some Pisan archbishops (Tempesti, Anteperistasi Pisane, p. 92; vide Appendix to this chapter, letter A). In 1293, when marble steps were added to the duomo, all these sarcophagi, excepting that of the Countess Beatrice, which was first placed inside the church, were removed to the Campo Santo (ibid.).

II.

heresy could be lodged, and churches in which the faithful could
be assembled for prayer. Thus, while the first developed civil
architecture, the latter acted upon ecclesiastical, and consequently
upon sculpture, which, as we have said, formed an integral part
of it. The war between the Hohenstaufens and the popes was Frederic
renewed, at the outset of Niccola Pisano's career, between Pope
Honorius III., and Frederic II., who, being king of Sicily through
his mother, of Jerusalem through his wife, and of the Romans
by election, and having been crowned emperor by the pope, of
whom he professed himself the vassal, was secretly preparing the
way for the subjugation of Italy, which he looked upon as his
rightful heritage.' Though he had bound himself to resign Sicily Nov. 22,
to his son Henry, immediately after his coronation, in order that it
should not be united to the Empire, and pledged himself to give
up to the Church the heritage of the Countess Matilda, and to
embark for the Holy Land within a year, he constantly cluded
the fulfilment of these promises, and openly or covertly thwarted
the plans of the Holy See.

The popes desired the independence of Italy, regarding it as necessary to their own freedom, while the emperor wished to put down both popes and republics, in order to bring about its unification under himself. In this plan, as well as in his resistance to papal authority, and in his attacks upon the vices, riches and power of the clergy-which put him in the position afterwards occupied by the leaders of the Reformation, though he, unlike them, was actuated by purely ambitious motives-Frederic was far in advance of his time.2

But the hour was not yet come for the unification of Italy, or for religious reform; and though Frederic pressed Rome hard, the

1 Italy is my heritage, and all the world knows it' (Declaration of War, A.D. 1236.-Kington, Life of Frederic II.).

2 M. Cherrier, Hist. de la Lutte des Papes, vol. ii. p. 397. Kington (op. cit.) says, Frederic's circular addressed to such prelates as mourned over the grasping and combative spirit of their head (Gregory IX., who had just excommunicated him in 1237), reads like a forerunner of the Reformation.

1220.