Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/318

Rh important it was, from the first, different in character from the sculpture of the North. It was different primarily in being the production of individual sculptors working independently, rather than of a school or guild. The name of the sculptor of almost every important statue or bas-relief in Italy is known; and even in cases of doubtful authorship the question, usually, is merely between one well-known master and another. To the great companies of workmen who, in France, wrought together for a common end—each one content to do his best work without thought of individual fame—there was hardly any parallel in Italy. And being an individual product, the work of the sculptor in Italy was naturally more independent of architectural connection than that of the Gothic sculptor had been. It never had such relationship with architecture as had existed in the French Gothic. The Italian regarded it rather as something to be particularly displayed than as a mere architectural auxiliary. Hence in Italy, statues, instead of being ranged in groups and connected with structural members, are put in isolated places; they are set in niches, or under corbelled canopies which have no constructive purpose—as in the façade of the Spina Chapel at Pisa,—or they are employed as finials to gables, etc., while reliefs are commonly carved upon broad wall surfaces, as at Orvieto and in the Campanile of Florence. Thus, though often effectively placed, sculpture in Italy never becomes so intimately and consistently associated with the building as to form an integral part of it.

In this sculpture two quite distinct elements curiously mingle—the one that of expression, approaching in character the expression of Northern Gothic, and the other formal, resulting from study of the Roman antique. Of these two elements, sometimes one and sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual genius of the artist. For instance, in the famous, though, as I think, much overrated sculptures of the pulpit of the Baptistery of Pisa, by Niccola Pisano, the inspiration of Roman models is clearly manifest in the treatment of forms, while of natural expression there is little. In the art of Niccola the spirit of the Renaissance is already manifest, and the Gothic spirit is, for the most part, wanting. The figure of the vigorous young athlete,