Part 17 (1/2)
To find the origin of the pointed arch would be difficult. Was it evolved from the arching trees in the German forest? or was it from the rich Arabian mosque or ancient Indian temple? or did the Comacines find it, just as they acquired their Basilican forms, on Italian soil?
Germany, it is pretty well proved, got the seed of her glorious Gothic from France or Italy, and nourished it right royally. But the pointed arch is much more ancient than German Gothic. It is to be seen in the tomb of Atreus at Mycenae, in an Etruscan tomb at Tarquinii, and even in the subterranean gallery at Antequere in Mexico.[129] The pointed arches in the Mosque El Haram on Monte Morea date from Caliph Omar's time, between 637 and 640. The Mosque of Amrou, with its curious combination of pointed and horse-shoe arches, dates from 640.
The church of St. Francis at a.s.sisi (1226) has generally been accepted as the first instance in Italy, and it was soon followed in the design for the church of S. Antonio at Padua five years later; but there are two little churches annexed to the monastery of Subiaco on Monte Telaso, which were built, so say the chroniclers, one in A.D. 981, the other in 1053, in which some arches are round and others acute.[130] Hope[131] quotes examples of this mixture of round and acute arches in the ninth and tenth centuries at Cluny, 1093-1134; the Abbey of Malmesbury in England, which is in Lombard style; St. Mark's at Venice, 976-1071; Subiaco, 847, and others.
”But,” as Selvatico remarks,[132] ”these are isolated instances determined by static reasons, and do not point to a system.” The Arab used the pointed arch as a decorative principle, as well as for stability. As the style spread in Europe it got modified, some countries keeping to the ancient type, and others changing its proportions. So the Arab arch became in the eleventh century the germ of the ogival arch, and in the twelfth expanded in the North into the most glorious forms of ecclesiastical Gothic architecture.
The Comacines made their first steps towards a more florid style, about the end of the eleventh century. The change, as in all such growths of circ.u.mstance, was a gradual one. First, a little more ornamentation, then a slight change in the forms of arches; next, a less fixed ground-plan of the churches, a mingling of the Greek cross with the square-walled Basilica. After these slight trials of their wings, came flights of imagination, and endless variety of form and ornamentation; that variety which could only spring from the ideas of many minds, united in one work.
To see the earliest signs of a wider scheme of design we must go to the region of Parma. Here in a little town called Borgo S.
Donnino--the ancient ”Fidentia Julia”--about fifteen miles north of Parma, is one of the finest early Romanesque churches in Italy. It was a great place for pilgrimages in the Middle Ages, as it contained the tomb of S. Domninus, who was martyred in the persecutions of Maximian. Great miracles were worked at his shrine, and religious fervour rose to such a height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the devotees collected money enough to build a church, which they desired should be the finest and most majestic of those times.
The work was finished before 1195. An ancient doc.u.ment shows that the _Rettori_ (civil governors) of Milan, Verona, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Faenza, Bologna, Reggio, Gravedone, Piacenza, and Padua, with their suites, all met there in that year to form a league against Henry VI., son of Frederic Barbarossa, who seemed likely to carry on the hostility of his father.[133] We have no doc.u.ments to show who was the architect of the fine Basilica of S. Donnino, but as the Comacines had their _laborerium_ at Parma, and as the work is clearly and distinctly Romanesque, we may believe the old authors who say that it arose _per lo scarpello dei Comacini_.[134] If internal evidence is wanting, the three lion portals of the ornate facade bear witness to the hand of the Comacines of the Romanesque epoch.
Another of their buildings which shows a marked advance, was the cathedral of Trent--the gate of Italy leading into Germany. This had been built in the first Lombard style between 1124 and 1149, when it was consecrated by the Patriarch of Aquileja. In 1207 the Bishop Federigo Manga, Chancellor of the Emperor Otho IV., formed a design to enlarge and almost rebuild it. He commissioned a _Magistro Comacino_ to superintend the works, as appears from an inscription in Gothic letters on the tomb of that very _Magister_. Anglicized it would run--”In the year of our Lord 1212, the last day of February, Master Adam of Arogno, of the diocese and district of Como (_Magister Adam de Arognio c.u.manae diocesis et circuito_), began the work of this church and constructed it. He with his sons and his _abbiatici_ (underlings) built the interior and exterior of this church with its adjoining parts. He and his sons lie below in this sepulchre. Pray for them.”
Prof. Cipolla, in an article in _Arte e Storia di Firenze_, quotes a poem written in 1309, in honour of the Duomo of Trent and of the Comacine Master who had achieved so much with his potent and clever hands (_c.u.mani Magistri qui potenti manu non inani complevit_).
The church has since then undergone several restorations, but in none of them has its plan been materially altered. There is still the octagonal dome, the circular apse at one end of the building, and the narthex at the other. The facade still honestly follows the lines of the roof, and has its little rows of pillared galleries across. The outside of the apse shows the new tendency to Romanesque more than the facade does; here arches and friezes in horizontal circles around it, take the place of the perpendicular shafts, and the single row of archlets on the top. It is more in the style of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Lucca churches. The arch of the north door rests on lions, which we may take as the secret sign of Romanesque Comacine work between the tenth and twelfth centuries, as the _intreccio_ or Solomon's knot had been their mark in the Lombard period.
The church of S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo is a valuable specimen not only of this transition in its early stage, but of the culmination of the Romanesque, two centuries later. An inscription on the arch of the portico records that it was founded in the time of Pope Innocent II.
and King Lothair II., _i.e._ about 1135, Rogerius being then the Bishop of Bergamo.[135] The builder's name is also recorded as Magister Fredus, probably short for G.o.dfredus. Magister Fredus is not expressly said here to be of the Guild of Comacines, but as his work was entirely in Lombard style, with a few slight indications of a freer school, and as the architects who succeeded him were, as may be proved by doc.u.ments, Comacine Masters chiefly from Campione, we may fairly make the hypothesis that he too was one of the guild. The little that remains of his work is to be seen in the interior, where the round arch still predominates, and in the exterior walls of the apse, with its crown of arches and colonnettes.
The parts due to the later brethren of the guild are the rich ornamentation of the two facades with their grand and characteristic Comacine porches, and also the Baptistery. It was in 1340 that Giovanni, son of Ugone (Big Hugh) of Campione, a _celebre scultore ed architetto_, was commissioned to build this Baptistery. According to the fixed laws of the Comacines he made it octagonal--the mystic sign of the Trinity, being formed of a threefold triangle. Around it entwine circles of arches and colonnettes, some lines having double columns; these reach to the cornice of the roof, which cornice is composed of reliefs allusive to the Sacrament of Baptism.
This work finished, Magister Giovanni went to Bellano on the east bank of Lake Como, together with two of his brotherhood, the Magister Antonio, son of the late Jacopo of Castellazzo da Peglio in the valley of Intelvi, and Magister Comolo, son of the late Magister Gufredo--probably a descendant of the Magister Fredus mentioned above--of Asteno, near Porlezza, to rebuild the church there, which had been ruined by age and repeated floods.[136] This church is in pure Lombard style, and has a facade in black and white marble, with a fine rose window, encircled with terra-cotta foliaged decorations.
After this Magister Giovanni of Campione was recalled to Bergamo to adorn the facades of the church which Fredus had left in a rough state 200 years before. These two facades faced north and south. Strange to say, the part opposite the altar has no door. In this new emprise Giovanni brought as his a.s.sistants his son Nicolino, a relative named Antonio (probably the one who had worked with him at Bellano), and a certain Giovanni Cattaneo, also from Campione. Giovanni, who was head architect, decided not to renovate the whole south facade facing the Piazza on which he began first, but to concentrate his ornamentation on a fine vestibule and doorway, to form a species of frontal. The vestibule was finished in 1351, having taken only two years. On the architrave he has himself chronicled it--”1351, m. Johannes de Campillione C. B. (civis Bergomensis) fecit hoc opus.” The whole front seems to have taken three years more, as on the base of the horse on which St. Alexander, patron saint of Bergamo, sits, may be read--”Filius Ughi de Campillione fecit hoc opus 1355.”
Good Master John of Campione did not long survive the execution of this masterpiece, for on the north porch is inscribed--”1360. Magister Johannes f. q. (filius quondam) Dom. Johannes de Campilio ...
(abrasion) fecit hoc opus in Christi nomine. Amen.”
This north porch, though so nearly coeval, shows a much greater advance in style. It is an eloquent proof of how architecture was progressing at this time by the grafting on of different influences.
John the father, being older, kept more closely to his Lombard traditions. John the son, being youthful and more open to conviction, took up new ideas. He has kept the Lombard arch in his porch, the moulding of which is extremely rich, and the lions of Judah duly support his pillars, but he has filled in his arch with very Gothic tracery, in trefoil arches, and over the Lombard columns of the upper storey of the porch are arches and decorations decidedly Oriental in appearance. It is about as good a specimen of the rich chaos of ideas that marks a transition stage as one can get, and shows that John the younger had been influenced by the Saracen-Norman influence in Sicily.
Fergusson, in his _Handbook of Architecture_, p. 790, gives an ill.u.s.tration of this porch. The Campione family evidently came from a race of sculptor-architects, for the church of S. Maria at Bergamo contains a sculptural work of much merit for the time, by Ugo da Campione, the father of Giovanni senior. It is the tomb of Cardinal Longhi degli Alessandri, who died at Avignon in 1329. The almost mediaeval artist compares not unfavourably with a very modern master from Como, Vincenzo Velada Ligurnetto, who in 1855 sculptured the neighbouring tomb of Donizetti placed near it.
Coming down the valley of the P to Cremona, we find ourselves on a scene of great Comacine industry. There is the Baptistery, dating before A.D. 1000, and the Cathedral begun in 1100. These were both works of the Lombard Masters; their style is identical, and over the architrave of the great cathedral door may be read in the Gothic characters used by them--
MCCLXXIIII.
Magister Jacobus Porrata.
da c.u.mis, fecit hanc Rotam.
_Rotam_ refers to the wheel window, which is a remarkably fine one, and is not, as some writers think, an illiterate mis-spelling of _portam_ (door). The rose window is prior to the one which Jacopo or Lapo, the so-called father of Arnolfo, placed in the facade of the Duomo of Arezzo, and is even superior to it in richness of design. To Jacobus Porrata is also attributed the princ.i.p.al entrance of Cremona cathedral, with the statues of the four prophets beside it. Over the architrave rises a species of porch, formed of little Lombard galleries, fringing as it were the arch. Below are the usual lion-supported pillars, the lions being carved in fine red marble. The vestibule above is formed of pointed arches, on each of which a lion crouches to sustain the finis.h.i.+ng _loggia_. The Comacine Masters seem to have formed a school and _laborerium_ at Cremona, for among the archives of the Duomo a deed has been found ent.i.tled _laborerio_, of the year 1289. It was drawn up by the notary Degoldo Malatesta on December 12 of that year, and on the part of the Revdo. P.
Cozzaconte, Bishop of Cremona, and the monk Ubertini, director and treasurer to the works of the Duomo, making a contract with Bonino and Guglielmo da Campione to build a stone stairway on the north of the cathedral towards S. Nicol, etc. etc. The stairs still exist, with remains of some little turrets which formed part of the design.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BAPTISTERY AT PARMA. DESIGNED BY BENEDETTO DA ANTELAMO, A.D. 1178.
_See page 187._]