United States or Maldives ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea islands occupied by the Polynesians is improbable but a race of mighty stone-carvers had swept through that ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before, and had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monuments and statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist, the archaeologist, and the engineer.
Finding at Ravello, near Amain, a pulpit sculptured in 1272 by Niccola di Bartolommeo da Foggia, they suggest that a school of stone-carvers may have flourished at Foggia, and that Niccola Pisano, in spite of his signing himself Pisanus on the Baptistery pulpit, may have been an Apulian trained in that school.
The fact is that the art of the stone-carvers or marmorarii had never entirely died out since the days of Roman greatness; nor was Niccola without respectable predecessors in the very town of Lucca, where he produced the first masterpiece of modern sculpture.
While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number.
Outside the city of the dead were the usual adjuncts of a large burying-place coffin-makers and stone-carvers, all living in dirty little cottages, surrounded by pigs, ducks, and young children. Leaving the cemetery and cottages behind, a too short drive brought us to a lovely valley, where we were to lunch at the temple of San Chew, in one of its fairest gorges.
This does not, however, interfere with the truth that sculpture, like all the arts, assumed a somewhat different character in each Italian city. The Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer and more passionate style than the Florentine, reproducing the types of Cima's and Bellini's paintings. Whole families, like the Bregni classes, like the Lombardi schools, like that of Alessandro Leopardi, worked together on the monumental sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and afterwards with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Perugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona the mediaeval tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit features markedly different from the monuments of Tuscany; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Florentine usage. On the terra-cotta mouldings, so frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of Modena, called Il Modanino, may be mentioned as the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its dependence upon architecture, and who modelled groups of overpowering dramatic realism. His "Piet
This of course would involve the creation of a class of stone-carvers who could be trusted with the execution of such work. Once grant the value of it, and public demand would encourage the supply, and the workmen would raise themselves in the effort. A louder note was sounded in an address at the St.
The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy. Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano.
One of the most marked features of this period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing.
We saw inside on many floors, modellers with their clay, modelling groups for the stone-carvers, in high or low relief, with utmost rapidity, freedom, finish, and appreciation of light and shade. The different methods of craftsmen in different countries is always interesting.
Word Of The Day