The Precursors Of Renaissance
The distinction between Gothic and Renaissance , so marked in the painting and sculpture of other countries, is very blurred in Italy. In the mid-thirteenth century, what is normally considered one of the key planks of the Renaissance - the rediscovery of the full sense of form, beauty and modelling characteristic of classical art - had already occurred with the statues of the Porta Romana in Capua , fragments of which are preserved in the town's museum. These were commissioned by Emperor Frederick II, who wished to revive memories of the grandeur that was Rome. Increasingly, Italians came to believe that it was northern barbarians who had destroyed the arts, which it was now their own duty to revive. A sculptor of south Italian origin who was doubtless familiar with the work at Capua, Nicola Pisano (c1220-84), developed this style, in four major surviving works - the pulpits of the Pisa Baptistery and the duomo in Siena, the Arca San Domenico in Bologna and the Fonte Gaia in Perugia. His figures have a sure sense of volume, with varying levels of relief used to create an illusion of space. Arnolfo di Cambio (c1245-1310), his assistant on some of these projects, developed the mix of classical and Gothic features in his own works, which include the famous bronze St Peter in Rome, and the Tomb of Cardinal de Braye in San Domenico in Orvieto. The latter defined the format of wall tombs for the next century, showing the deceased lying on a coffin below the Madonna and Child, all set within an elaborate architectural framework. Of even greater long-term significance was the achievement of Giovanni Pisano (c1248-1314), who abandoned his father's penchant for paganism, adopting instead new and dramatic postures for his figures which were quite unlike anything in the previous history of sculpture. This is nowhere more evident than in the statues he created for the facade of the duomo in Siena, which are placed high up rather than round the portals, and are a world away from their static counterparts on French cathedrals. It was only in the last three decades of the thirteenth century that Italian painters finally began to break away from the time-honoured Byzantine formulas, a new sense of freedom initiated by Pietro Cavallini (active 1273-1308) in Rome and developed by the Florentine Cimabue (c1240-1302), who introduced rounded forms to his fresco of The Madonna of St Francis in the lower church at Assisi. His masterpiece, the Passion cycle in the upper church, is sadly ruined, but enough remains to give evidence of the overwhelming tragic grandeur it must once have possessed. Whereas Cimabue's works were still rooted in the Byzantine tradition, and made no attempt to break away from a flat surface effect, a huge leap was made by his pupil and fellow Florentine, Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337), whose innovations were to define the entire subsequent course of Western art. Giotto decisively threw off the two-dimensional restrictions of painting, managing to give his pictures an illusion of depth. Thanks to having better materials at his disposal than Cimabue, his Life of St Francis in the upper church at Assisi survived remarkably well until the 1997 earthquake; his decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, however, is still in good condition. These two great cycles are the best examples of Giotto's genius in all its many facets. Among these are such basic principles as a sense for the significant, unencumbered by surplus detail; the convincing treatment of action, movement, gesture and emotion; and total command over technical matters like figure modelling, foreshortening, and effects of light and shade.
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