Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/657

 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 601 of Renaissance architecture. Brunelleschi's bold dome at Florence, one hundred and thirty-five feet in diameter and one hundred and forty-five feet in height, is often spoken of as the first masterpiece of Renaissance architecture. But it was the crowning feature of a cathedral in Italian Gothic style, and its builder was able to profit by a study of the earlier medieval dome of the baptistery just across the square. Such domes as this and that of St. Peter's, which are raised on drums and pointed in shape, rise much higher above the rest of the building than the low domes of the Roman Pantheon or Byzantine St. Sophia. To such hemi- spherical domes they stand in much the same relation that a pointed Gothic arch does to a round Roman arch. They may be regarded, then, as a last stage of medieval archi- tecture rather than as a revival due to the study of anti- quity. Among the gifted sculptors, numerous but for the most part anonymous, who were at work in Italy and other lands during the thirteenth century, a certain Niccola Niccol of Pisa (c. 1 206-1 2 78) has attracted considerable Pisano and notice by the use he made of figures on an an- lotto cient sarcophagus in his design of a church pulpit. He is, however, too early to be classed as a Renaissance artist. But the paintings of Giotto (c. 1 266-1 337), who was a contem- porary of Dante on the one hand and of Petrarch on the other, bring us to the borderland of the Renaissance period. North of the Alps painting had developed little as yet in the Middle Ages except for the miniatures in manuscripts and the designs for stained-glass windows. In Italy there was more space on the walls of churches and monasteries for mo- saics or for fresco paintings. A fresco is painted directly upon the wall or ceiling while the plaster is still moist. In many respects Giotto's frescoes were still crude and awk- ward. Objects were not of the right size compared to other objects nor in the correct perspective, and his figures were sometimes stiff. But to his contemporaries his paintings were a revelation in lifelikeness and fidelity to nature. The point was that instead of keeping his pictures symbolical