Arnolfo di Cambio e lo "stil nuovo" del gotico italiano by Angiola Maria RomaniniReview by: Manfred WundramThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 624-625Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049170 .

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624 THE ART BULLETIN

ANGIOLA MARIA ROMANINI, Arnolfo di Cambio e lo "stil nuovo" del gotico italiano, Milan, Casa Editrice Ceschina, I969. Pp. 251; 252 ills. L. Io,ooo.

Arnolfo di Cambio has not been greatly favored in art-historical literature. The sculptor and the architect have always been con- sidered separately, and the evaluation of his work has swung between disinterest and high admiration; he was seen sometimes as only an "academic," with particularly unclear outlines, some- times as the co-founder of a new epoch. The present book, which was preceded by a series of publications on Italian Gothic art by the same author1, is neither a "corpus" of Arnolfo's work nor a

monograph in the strict sense of the term. The author's intention was to find the essential thread which would establish Arnolfo's artistic personality, and to show the correlation between the architect and the sculptor; to bring the structural principles of the

buildings and the sculpture down to a single denominator, each illuminated by the other. If a monograph may be thought of not as a uniformly proportioned discussion of all the certain and attrib- uted works, but as the definition of an artistic personality and its

place in the context of its age, Romanini's book may certainly be treated as the first important monograph on the sculptor-architect Arnolfo di Cambio.

While to some extent previous research, with its detailed

analysis of individual forms, had replaced the forest with the trees, the author explicitly repudiates narrow stylistic classifications within the sculpture and corresponding distinctions of various

executing hands. Instead, she undertakes a largely persuasive effort to trace the unifying concept that underlies the various out- ward forms that we see: that is, a synthesis of "abstract" linearity and plastic, three-dimensional inventiveness, to be found in nearly every work.

The book is divided between a study of the certain works and a discussion of some of the most interesting and hotly debated attributions.

With attentive care the author explores the roots of Arnolfo's

stylistic development in Nicola Pisano's workshop. With proper caution, some figures in the Siena Pulpit and the Arca of San Domenico in Bologna are attributed to Arnolfo; more important, a basic distinction between teacher and assistant is defined for the first time with precision. While in Nicola the architectural context dominates the sculpture, most strongly in the Perugia Fountain, in Arnolfo's work the sculptures or the interconnections of the figures in a scene outweigh the architectural framing, and while Nicola

emphasizes the space-creating volumes of individual figures, Arnolfo underlines the surface projections of the figural elements.

The outstanding contribution to Arnolfo information in the book is the thoroughly grounded reconstruction of the Tomb of Cardinal de Braye, in San Domenico, Orvieto. The older efforts at

reconstruction2 had started with the assumption that the whole, by analogy with other wall tombs of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, must have been enclosed in a baldachin with triangular gable, pointed arch, and spiral columns. In contrast, the author arrives at a much more differentiated structure, through a careful study of the fragments preserved in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Orvieto. According to her, the tomb chamber and the upper story were originally separated by an architrave; the crowning triangular gable, with an inscribed trefoil, was articu- lated with pinnacles at the top and the corners, and the figure groups placed opposite each other in the upper part of the upper story were in turn enclosed in trefoil gables on small columns. In many respects the reconstruction is persuasive; the scaling of the whole in width and depth, and the arrangement of the upper figure groups, including their architectural frames, may be con- sidered certain. However, the arrangement of the architrave dividing the whole in two, halfway up, is not firm; the size of the two fragments of an architrave, together equal to the total breadth

of the tomb, is suggestive, but it cannot be overlooked that these two beam sections (fig. 20) show mosaics with different patterns. What is more, the attachment of the architrave as proposed by the author would noticeably cut the view from below of the upper figure group, and the fine spatial layering, which proceeds steadily from the base to the upper story, would be abruptly interrupted at this point. Nor can one follow the author in offering confirmations for her reconstruction through references to other architectural frames with architraves in Arnolfo's work, for the Annibaldi Tomb in San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, according to the drawing in Codex Barberini Lat. 4423 in the Vatican (fol. 23r), clearly had no architrave, but a roof on a narrow molding over the tomb niche, while the Savelli Tomb in Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome is a different tomb type altogether. But such details of the reconstruction, which probably cannot be settled, are less import- ant than the author's presentation of her views on the place of the De Braye Tomb in the history of the development of the Italian tomb. In comparison with the traditional type seen in the Cosmati tombs, it not only enriches the figural elements generally, but at the same time arranges them in a kind of "scenic" interrelation. The sculptures of the lower and upper stories are connected within a strict geometric structure, whose planimetric qualities also soften the intervals of spatial depth; the architectural and figural con- ceptions mesh and reinforce each other.

The author also devotes a penetrating analysis to the two tabernacle altars in Rome, in San Paolo fuori le Mura (1284) and Santa Cecilia (1293). The stylistic differences between the two, so closely similar in type, are worked out more clearly than ever before. The later tabernacle in Santa Cecilia is less "Gothic" in its proportions and ornament, not as compact in its general effect, more decidedly spatial in its organization (as in the diagonal slicing off of the corners), and is distinguished both by tighter linking of the figures to the architectural frame and by greater architectural logic, for example, in the handling of the corner of the arcade level. Unlike the great majority of previous scholars, the author persuasively supports Arnolfo's authorship of the Santa Cecilia tabernacle figures. But may we really assign the architect- ural concept and sculptural decoration of both works to the same person ? The question would call for close study, and can only be raised here with caution. Still it is striking that the signature of the San Paolo tabernacle explicitly names one "Pietro socio," who has not been convincingly identified so far, while the later work is signed by Arnolfo alone. May the emphatic reference to the collaborator signify that this "Pietro socio" executed the earlier tabernacle independently within Arnolfo's large workshop? The figures in San Paolo, unlike those in Santa Cecilia, do show a general suggestion of the antique in their type, and in this way depart from the characteristics of Arnolfo's certain works. And the numerous forms in a "style rayonnant" cannot be considered tokens of Arnolfo's authorship, since such qualities were already distinct, if less abundant, in the De Braye Tomb, and are dimin- ished in the Cecilia tabernacle.

In this connection, one might raise the question whether the author does not give the influence of French High Gothic of the mid-thirteenth century on Arnolfo's work too great a role, at the center of her interpretation of him. A coming to terms with the "style rayonnant" is, certainly, an important component in his stylistic formation, and yet the many external adoptions of High Gothic forms affect it far less than Arnolfo's style of linear abstrac- tion. When the author then asserts (page I64) that "Gothicism" is the key problem in understanding all aspects of Arnolfo's work, the balance seems to have been displaced against the influence of Nicola Pisano and the ancient and medieval tradition of Rome. The unbridgeable gap between Arnolfo and the French High Gothic is especially marked just where at first glance the relation would seem particularly close, in a comparison of the funeral frieze of the Annibaldi Tomb, to which the author devotes a

1 On this theme see in particular "Il 'dolce stil nuovo' di Arnolfo di

Cambio," Palladio, I-Iv, 1965, 37-68. 2 E. Paniconi, Monumento al Cardinale Guglielmo De Braye nella chiesa di S.

Domenico in Orvieto, Rome, I906; L. Fiocca, "Monumento al Cardinale Guglielmo De Braye nella chiesa di S. Domenico in Orvieto," Rassegna d'Arte, 1911, 116-120.

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BOOK REVIEWS 625

brilliant analysis, with the Paliotto from Saint Germer in the Musee Cluny, Paris. The author herself points out how Arnolfo

replaces the wave-like flowing line of the French work with a "hard

geometric rhythm" and how in the Annibaldi frieze the structural and architectonic tendency is incomparably more evolved. The differences could be even more explicitly remarked upon than they are in the author's analysis, for instance by noting the function of the "crystalline" intervals of space between the figures, "negative volumes" that play no part in the French example used for

comparison. It is a primary concern of the book to uncover a unified defini-

tion of the architect and sculptor Arnolfo. In his personality, architectural approaches always dominate, even when he is work-

ing as a sculptor and mosaicist. The human figure in particular is subordinated to architectural rules of proportion in its construc- tion. Consequently the author devotes three of her seven chapters largely to Arnolfo's activity as an architect. In a brilliant analysis, the Cathedral of Orvieto, ascribed by Vasari to Nicola Pisano but in modern study associated at various points with Arnolfo, and Santa Croce in Florence, included by Vasari in Arnolfo's work, are contrasted as representatives of two periods of stylistic develop- ment, although they are identical in date. Conversely, the author

succeeds, with the aid of Arnolfo's known sculptural work as

previously categorized, in pinning down the closely interrelated

buildings of Santa Croce and the Florence Badia as works of the

sculptor-architect. The hypothesis is not new in the literature,3 but has never been so persuasively grounded. In particular the choir

facades of the two churches are directly linked to the principles of Arnolfo's figure formation; in all his productions the surface is the

protagonist; all the parts are projected onto this surface and join in the unity of an abstract linear system.

Once one has accepted the attribution of Santa Croce and the Badia to Arnolfo - and in my opinion the comparison with Arnolfo's sculpture settles the matter - then admittedly the simultaneous attribution to Arnolfo of the dome project for Santa Maria del Fiore faces insurmountable difficulties, whatever form the original project may have had. If Arnolfo's production as

sculptor and architect is to be "synchronized" - and the author is the first to do this with notable success - then the sculpture by him for the facade of Florence Cathedral and the idea of the dome come into conflict. Here the author is obviously influenced by the

suggestions of the sources and the mass of preceding literature that Arnolfo must have been the creator of the dome project. To the extent that she interprets the facade sculptures in terms of the dome project, her deductions must miss fire; I cannot recognize the "decisive will to space" (page Io8) in the facade figures. And when she writes, "As the upper torsoes of the two figures of Mary [in the Nativity and Death of Mary] rise massively out of the net- work of lines that runs through the horizontal bodies, so does the mass of the dome grow full and hard as the conclusion of the horizontal nave" (page i 16), the situation is almost the reverse with respect to the sculptures, particularly the figures of Mary, where the intended spatial turn seems to be especially subordin- ated to that "projection of surfaces" which the author herself has established as one of the constituent signs of Arnolfo's architectural and sculptural work alike. The dome project, on the contrary, in its emphasis on space-creating volume and its combination of stereometric bodies, represents a viewpoint basically different from Arnolfo's work. If we cast off the burden of the literary tradi- tion, it may well be asked whether the choir solution anticipated by Arnolfo for the new cathedral might perhaps have had a quite different form, and whether the introduction of a dome might not have taken place at a later point in the complicated building history.4

Aside from such questions of detail, which must be the object of

continuing research, Romanini's book is the most significant attempt yet made to define, demarcate and locate the personality of Arnolfo in its place in evolving history. Arnolfo must be seen as one of the leading artists at the threshold of a new epoch, whose

greatest figures are Dante and Giotto. For the future discussion of Arnolfo, this book provides a new point of departure, not least for the question of Arnolfo's influence on Italian art of the early fourteenth century, a question that so far has hardly been recog- nized in its outlines.

MANFRED WUNDRAM

University of Bochum

3 E.g., U. Middeldorf and W. Paatz, "Die gotische Badia zu Florenz und ihr Erbauer Arnolfo di Cambio," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, III, 8, 1919-32, 492-517- 4 A new attempt to clarify the history of the origin of the dome project is undertaken in the Bochum dissertation of G. Kreytenberg, "Der Dom in Florenz: Bau und Dekoration im 14. Jahrhundert," soon to appear as a book.

BERNHARD DEGENHART AND ANNEGRIT SCHMITT, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 1300-1450, Teil. I, Mittel- und Sud-

Italien, Berlin, Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1968, Four vols., pp. 712, 983 text ills., I 143 pls. DM. 950.

The four large volumes that make up this work, two of text and two of plates, are devoted to 635 drawings produced in a century and a half in the central and southern parts of Italy only. The

corpus thus is not only incomplete, but could be doubled or, per- haps, even more than doubled.

So vast an undertaking was certainly conceived by the senior editor, Degenhart, who in fact has concerned himself with only the

history of drawing in Italy for the past several decades. Yet if we consider the complexity and breadth of the task, it is astonishing that two scholars alone, he and his collaborator, were able to fulfill this ambitious plan. For, aside from provenance, measurements and bibliography, each separate object has been studied to deter- mine the materials (parchment or paper, with the watermarks of the latter treated in an appendix reproducing no less than 125

types), the technique, in relation to the techniques used in painting as well, the iconography and the style, all in the light of historical and philological factors. To do this, careful preparation in all the various specialties was required and clearly exceptional deter- mination and perseverance were essential. It is thus with admira- tion and interest that we leaf through these four volumes, pausing at the illustrations, each of which raises its own set of problems. On what criteria is this corpus presented ? It was very difficult to set

chronological boundaries, and the subdivision and classification of the objects, though obviously in a chronological and stylistic sequence within schools, was not without its own difficulty.

The authors begin at about I3oo as they felt that it was not

possible to follow a history of drawing any earlier. However, I

suspect that tomorrow it will be possible, if the preparatory drawings, the so-called sinopie, are suitably brought into light in the restoration of medieval works of art painted on wall and panel. It was felt that this large and complex material could be carried up to ca. 1450, since with the Renaissance drawing takes on its own

independent character.

Actually the material presented is far from uniform, and shows as well varied processes of creation. The authors, for example, take into account manuscripts with scenes in pure line drawing, which contribute individual drawings in finished form, to the wide variety of medieval culture. There are also collections in which the

copyist adds something personal, making his own work of art if he is an artist. We find scattered sheets reflecting compositions of famous masters, which expand our knowledge of lost works, as in the case of the copies of Giotto's Navicella. Among these (and this is a novelty in the Corpus) a Florentine drawing already of the

quattrocento, in The Metropolitan Museum, New York, takes on

particular importance. But among the many isolated drawings there are also the first recorded thoughts of creative activity, most

usually associated with the Renaissance but now found in the Gothic period as well. It is chiefly to the Gothic period that the illustrated manuscripts and collections belong. Contract drawings appear then as well. But if I am not mistaken, the authors, in their packed fifty-page introduction on the history of style and theory of drawing, disagree with the view that the Middle Ages knew only renderings. Even in the copies drawing may attain in-

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