Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/319

Rh called La Forza, which is placed against one of the angles of this pulpit, exhibits, in its pose and anatomical modelling, a purely classic motive which is far removed from Gothic feeling. And it is worthy of notice that the classic elements in this work differ widely from the classic elements that are present in French Gothic sculpture. In the one case they are imitative, in the other they are innate. In the one case they are superficial, in the other they are essential. The principles of ancient art were, indeed, no less familiar to Niccola than they had been to the Gothic carvers—they were probably more so,—but he did not, it would seem, in these sculptures of Pisa, work so much from his native instincts as from a spirit of conscious emulation of models that he had seen and admired. A passion for excellence of form, as displayed in these models, was apparently the ruling passion of the artist's mind. In the reliefs of the panels the characteristics of that Roman art, which was itself but a formal imitation of the Greek, is no less strongly marked. In the grouping and execution of these figures the sculptor has given us little of his own. He has followed his models closely. Not only are the types largely Roman, but even the peculiar conventions of treatment, in draperies and other details, are equally so. The redundance and artificiality of Roman design are reproduced with curious exactness. It is not, perhaps, strange that the Roman work, with which he was brought in contact, should so strongly have appealed to him. In comparison with the contemporary native art the carvings of the Greco-Roman Sarcophagi in the Campo Santo exhibit great superiority in the forms; but it seems a little remarkable that an Italian in the thirteenth century should have been so far carried away with admiration of this ancient art as to allow so little of what was peculiar to mediæval Italian genius to express itself in his work. One looks in vain, in these reliefs by Niccola, for those refinements of conception and treatment which mark the works of his immediate successors. It is only in the rendering of animal life—in the beasts which support the pillars of the pulpit—that a living and original faculty is clearly apparent.

Few other early Italian sculptors were so strongly influenced by Roman art. The reliefs of Giovanni Pisano at