GOTICA, ARTE

GOTHIC ART.

The term “Gothic,” originally applied more properly to ogival architecture and later extended to all the arts of that period, dates from the mature Italian Renaissance (Vasari) and, in its historical inaccuracy, implies a judgment: the negative judgment of classical-Renaissance and Mediterranean taste—including the French in the 16th–17th centuries—in comparison with the creations of the Middle Ages and the North, which had expressed themselves more manifestly in architecture. Although inexact, the term remains in common usage; the judgment was reversed with the rise of Romantic taste.

This art is truly the final manifestation of medieval civilization, in which it achieved a perfect expressive balance.

This explains two fundamental traits that characterize the physiognomy of the Gothic.

The first is the spontaneity of the evolutionary process by which the new figurative language seems almost imperceptibly to free itself from the old. There is no crisis of Romanesque from which Gothic emerges; rather, Romanesque gradually dissolves into the new style through a long and almost imperceptible dissolution. The other fundamental trait of Gothic is its refined mannerism—provided the term is understood as a fully valid imaginative procedure that seeks its motivations in prior experiences, through a slow and subtle stylistic elaboration of themes, schemas, and ideal types. In this respect, there is a kind of analogy between Gothic art and classical art, when classicism is understood as a stylistic category, as a mode of being of the imagination rather than as a historical determination. Gothic art is thus one that is deliberately reflective and steeped in culture—not only visual culture, but also literary and above all religious culture. It is an intellectualism that can still be compared to that of the Renaissance, though antithetical in its content: both are directed toward the search—first intuitive, then scientific—for a system, for an essential law inherent in vision and representation. The Renaissance sought the norm of perspective; Gothic, the static equilibrium; the former with a naturalistic content, the latter with an idealistic one.

A third characteristic of Gothic art is the tendency by which each particular language (architecture, sculpture, painting) shifts its center, axis, or direction—its very “property”—toward the boundary of the contiguous language: architecture thus tends toward the plastic, sculpture toward the pictorial, and painting toward the architectural.

This increasing predominance of plastic values in architecture has its roots in that tectonic accompaniment from which, over more than a century of remarkable creative fervor, the entire organic rhythm of Gothic architecture developed: namely, the narrow arch (though some scholars reject this etymology), the ribbed vault that reinforced the ceilings to increase load-bearing capacity.

It is not yet clear whether this element, which is the key to the entire system, appeared early in Italy in the oldest parts of Milan’s Sant’Ambrogio or in San Flaviano in Montefiascone; but it is certain that here such a structural idea remained sterile, while it became a seed that germinated and flourished with marvelous vigor in France, precisely in the heart of the Île-de-France, which, after the tribulations of the 10th century, was entering a new and splendid period of orderly prosperity. It was a time when the political power that administered the country and the religious authority, organized in firm hierarchies around the bishops, equally promoted great enterprises in culture—with the founding of the Universitas Studiorum—and in the arts, with the construction of superb cathedrals, increasingly dedicated to the Virgin, whose devotion grew steadily between the 12th and 13th centuries. It was also the time of the composition of the great epic songs of the Carolingian cycle and the establishment of a literary language. And it was the time of the Crusades, which brought broad contacts—not only of conflict—with the East, and thus a new richness and variety of cultural experiences.

In this felicitous conjunction, the technical motif of the ribbed vault reached its most extraordinary possibilities of development.

Already used liberally within older Romanesque schemes (e.g., by Guillaume de Sens in the cathedral of his city in the second quarter of the 12th century), it was destined to transform radically the imagination and technique, to formulate a new poetics of architecture, and indeed to determine a new spatial conception.

But the ogival arch does not strictly mean a pointed arch, although in common usage the terms ogival, pointed, and Gothic have come to be equivalent and interchangeable. The pointed arch or “acute arch” (resulting from the intersection of two round arches), not unknown in Eastern architecture, had already been widely employed in Burgundian Romanesque architecture (Cluny, Autun, Paray-le-Monial, etc.), but only when this acute profile was applied to the rib did its full tectonic value become apparent—its capacity to bear greater loads with less lateral thrust. From this came a series of ingenious solutions to the problem of neutralizing, by verticalizing, this dangerous lateral thrust: the flying buttresses, which replaced the Romanesque buttresses; the exceedingly robust keystones; and the pinnacles and spires designed to overload the piers, increasing their vertical thrust to absorb the lateral. This facilitated the task of covering the entire building with stone, reducing the actual construction to the skeleton: the architectural value was decisively shifted from walls to ribs, from surfaces to volumes.

On these principles, the activity of builders wove poetic inventions with technical achievements and elaborated an organic system remarkable for its strength and elasticity, sustained by the quality of the stone from the various French quarries.

The technical possibilities offered by the pointed arch, now closely linked to the rib, spurred architects to vie in height: the mirage that attracted them is one of the fascinations of this architecture. The upward thrust, the intoxication of the vertical—often cited in popular opinion as the typical expression of medieval mysticism—must be received with considerable reservation. For if anything, in these new stylistic attitudes one might discern the expression of new tastes and aspirations in collective life: a more agile rhythm, a freer breath, a calmer tone—especially when one considers one of the most vital demands and one of the most certain achievements of this new style: the luminosity of interiors. In any case, what is usually described as an expression of the sense of the infinite would be better defined as a representation of the indefinite.

Indeed, once the perimeter masonry was stripped of its original architectural value as a surface, and all tectonic function was transferred to the essential framework of the building’s members, the solid walls could be pierced by windows, swallowed up by voids, until they vanished altogether—as in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which is nothing more than an enormous, wondrous casket of transparent glass.

On the other hand, even when reduced to their pure necessity, architects and craftsmen increasingly recognize the economy of buildings and, with functional predominance, achieve an autonomous existence and an ever more distinct and substantial individuality. The building thus resolves itself into a modulation of masses alternately solid and void, and architectural imagination crystallizes in the effects of the atmospheric medium, variously illuminated and colored in relation to the stony consistency of the supporting volumes around which it flows.

The environmental unity of the construction is thus broken by a multiplicity of plastic accidents. The body of the great cathedrals becomes a succession of stems that, at their summit, open into star-like branches intersecting in a dense network so as to constitute an open and indefinite rhythm that absorbs into a single flow naves, transepts, choir, radiating apse, and annuls every spatial distinction. A continuous rhythm whose development concludes with perfect coherence in the circularity of the choir with ambulatory. This is a motif that, like many others, Gothic takes from Romanesque-monastic architecture of the north, especially Cluniac, developing it according to its own principles in the perimeter of the enclosing wall and in the ring of radiating chapels around the sanctuary.

In this spatial conception, sculptural decoration asserts itself with ever greater independence, no longer merely covering the surface of the architectural structure but associating with it in an integral synthesis.

The Gothic architects drew inspiration from some of the most solemn natural spectacles: that of the forest, not as a model but as a module. The forest in its character of boundless grandeur, both dominating and liberating. A comparison that, moreover, already appears in the writings of Romantic authors from Forster to Chateaubriand.

Born within Romanesque architecture, Gothic architecture, after an initial phase in which old schemes persist mingled with new ones, increasingly defines its fundamental characteristics in works where the new language is expressed in all its purity: Notre-Dame in Paris may be considered the example of the achieved perfection of this type of construction. The cathedral of Amiens has been called the "Parthenon" of Gothic.

These constructions, in the second half of the 12th century and throughout the 13th, are founded and grow both in major centers and in small towns and villages. Colossal enterprises to which all social classes contribute and sometimes several generations, which thus bear in their details the imprint of the evolving style, while almost always preserving a marvelous overall unity. They manifest a variety of regional schools due to the influence of local taste traditions and the different genius of architects (Île-de-France, Soissonnais, Champagne, Burgundy, Normandy).

Beyond the boundaries of its birth and youth, Gothic architecture rapidly extends its dominion (a veritable violent conquest, according to Viollet-le-Duc, consequent upon the expansion of the Capetian monarchy) throughout France, and then, with ever greater differentiation, across all of Europe, maintaining unchallenged sway until the end of the 14th century and much of the 15th, and especially in German lands, well into the 16th, even into the so-called German Renaissance. So deeply ingrained did this language become in German, and more broadly Northern, taste that, after the almost universal triumph of Italianizing Mannerism in the second half of the 16th century, at the beginning of the 17th century there is a sudden rekindling of it, latent in France in especially civil works of Henri IV and Louis XIII style, but explicitly declared in buildings in Germany, such as the Jesuit church in Cologne, built in the early 17th century in what may be called "posthumous" Gothic, as well as in Würzburg, Dettelbach, Prague, and Fribourg in Switzerland. Nor is this all, for there is the case of Baroque-Gothic by the Italo-Bohemian Giovanni Santini Aichel, who in Bohemia at the beginning of the 18th century translated Baroque spirit into Gothic form. To this case is not unrelated that of Borromini (already noted by Baldinucci for his affinities with the "Gothic manner") and Guarini, who in 1679 designed a Gothicizing façade for the Theatines' church in Prague. Not to mention the 19th-century Neo-Gothic revival, partly a spontaneous manifestation of the Romanesque revival, partly a cultural contrivance.

The happy spontaneity of conception by which structure and decoration arose spontaneously and were realized in a synthesis always balanced in essential values gradually gives way to an increasingly labored search for accessories, a passion for superficial decorative values that ends up sapping the vigor of structural invention, distorting the sense of material, and reducing architecture to embroidery or goldsmithing.

The poetics of these late Gothic—"Flamboyant"—artists thus culminates in the academic. Examples of this stage are, in France, the "Brou" in Bourg (1512–32); outside France, the cathedrals of Burgos and Milan; the "Manueline" style in Portugal; the "Mudejar" (through Islamic crossings) in Spain; the "Tudor" in England with its characteristic "fan vaults," perhaps the happiest outcome of this trend.

The golden period of Gothic lasts about a century and a half. From the initial moment of Sens under the plans of Guillaume de Sens (also author of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral [begun c. 1140]), St-Denis, by Abbot Suger (1140), the first design of Chartres (1145), Étampes (1150), Langres (1150), Senlis (1155), St-Germain-des-Prés (choir, 1157), Laon (1160), Corbeil (1180); to the moment of full fruition yet still fresh and almost contained with Notre-Dame in Paris at the initiative of Bishop Maurice de Sully (completion of the choir, 1250), Soissons (south transept, 1177), the reconstruction of Chartres after the fire of 1194; to the most abundant flourishing of the cathedrals of Troyes (1208), Reims (1211), designed by Jean d'Orbais, perhaps the most harmoniously balanced masterpiece despite the extraordinary richness and complexity of its motifs, Auxerre (1215), Amiens (1220), designed by Robert de Luzarches, Strasbourg (crypt 11th century, full 13th century); up to the final models: the Sainte-Chapelle, built by St. Louis between 1246 and 1248, and St-Urbain in Troyes, by Jean Langlois (1202).

In this period, Gothic sculpture is born, or rather, it arises within the very framework of Gothic architecture, following its evolutionary phases closely. True statuary also re-emerges, with full-round figures restoring sculpture’s autonomy, even as it maintains the perfect harmony between the two arts that is characteristic of the style. An example is the west portal of Chartres, dating to 1145, of which some statue groups remain. Within a mere five years, as taste rapidly matured, the original design was transformed into a far richer one: the façade was advanced slightly, and the jambs of the two side portals were adorned with statue-columns, which, pressed close to the central portal, together form the wondrous “Royal Portal.” Thus, one of the elements that, along with the spired towers, would become essential to the cathedral’s structure began to take shape at Chartres. In the “Portal of the Kings,” a first group of sculptors already embodied the new era. Yet their work soon seemed outdated in comparison with that of another workshop, more decisively modern; the first group withdrew and moved to Étampes. The second workshop, the true innovator—likely having just worked on the central portal of Saint-Denis—probably completed the “Portal of the Kings” with other collaborators.

Sculptors working on the single-portal façade of Senlis produced works that were still in an early stage of development.

The most splendid phase of Gothic sculpture begins after 1194 with the reconstruction of Chartres, when the importance of the north and south transepts grew so much that their completion required additional true façades, adorned with portals and statues. This slightly archaizing character distinguishes the school of Chartres from that of Paris, especially in the two other portals of Notre-Dame, from that of Amiens, and from that of Reims, which already foreshadows the imminent Mannerist phase.

Critics, particularly French ones, believe they can discern in Gothic sculpture’s renewal a sense of tranquility, in stark contrast to the so-called “spiritual style” of the Romanesque period in the nearby Burgundian school (Autun, Vézelay, etc.).

A sense of calm and decorum is evident in such works as the “Visitation” at Reims, the supreme ideal beauty of the “Beautiful God” at Amiens, or the purity of certain almost Praxitelean nudes in the “Stories of Creation” at the Sainte-Chapelle. This stylistic approach is the fitting artistic expression of an entirely new economic, social, and political situation, with new tastes and aspirations that also found concrete and precise classical grounding in the direct knowledge of ancient exemplars.

The classical influence is plainly evident in the lively ferment of Provençal sculpture (Saint-Gilles, Arles). It is certain that a tenacious vein of classicism—albeit with Celtic inflections—sustained the work of the neighboring Auvergnat sculptors, who in many respects resemble the Lombards. In any case, monuments of ancient plastic art were not lacking even in the Île-de-France, and they abounded, as did those in the neighboring regions of the Middle Rhine, the Meuse, and the Moselle. The “Visitation” at Reims is proof enough. Above all, however, it is reasonable to suppose that renewed contact with the East and with the refined Byzantine culture of the Macedonian period—bound to classical sources by a tradition that even iconoclasm could not entirely sever—provided artists with exemplars of a beauty so different from that generally pursued in the medieval West (cf. the “Beautiful God” of Amiens with the Christ in the “Harbaville Triptych”). This new style tended to grow more complex on one hand through an ever more detailed—and thus, ultimately, more superficial—observation of natural reality, and on the other through an ever richer infusion of pathos. The growing search for characteristic details culminated in a revived interest in portraiture, so that from the still entirely generic representations of the oldest royal, princely, or episcopal tombs with recumbent statues (e.g., at the abbey of Fontevrault and those commissioned by St. Louis at Saint-Denis), one passes to the splendid characterizations of the great unknown master of Naumburg. From the vivid portraits carved by Peter Parler, architect of Prague Cathedral, to the multiple statues of Charles V (especially the work of André Beauneveu [1364] in the most recent series at Saint-Denis), and to the creations of Claus Sluter (the portal of the Charterhouse of Champmol and, above all, the “Well of Moses,” after 1389). Beauneveu, who was also a miniaturist, and Sluter, a Dutchman by birth and Franco-Flemish in culture, already partake of the tastes and stylistic attitudes of the so-called “International Gothic.”

of which it will be necessary to make mention is the "Cistercian Gothic." A reaction against the opulence of Cluniac architecture (Cluny, until the renovation of St. Peter's in Rome, was the largest church in Christendom), which was not merely ostentatious display of luxury and splendor but an organic compromise of refined culture, Cistercian Gothic fulfills this demand for essentiality with a more complete adherence to the proper modes of architectural language, that is, in the true and proper configuration of space, the delimitation of environments, and without that shift of stylistic tones toward the plastic sector which has been noted in the other current of Gothic, that of the cathedrals. Thus the accent of this peculiar Cistercian voice of Gothic is placed on the values of line and surface, in the rigid hardness of sharp profiles, in the fairly wide expanse of walls, in the quadrangular plan of the chapels and the chevet, in place of the broken and jagged layout of polygonal apses and radiating chapels. The result is a clear design that absorbs into the new Gothic structural functionality remote paleo-Christian basilica motifs. It is obvious, therefore, that such a spatial conception, on the one hand, proves suitable to the new directions of monasticism, and on the other, becomes particularly fruitful in Italian soil. Here, works of pure Gothic are very rare and always lagging behind the French originals; from S. Andrea in Vercelli, of relatively primitive and simple forms, a rather provincial version of the "Victorine" type (a French variety not so distant from the Cistercian), to S. Francesco in Bologna—one of the few examples of a peribolos plan with a radiating array of apsidal chapels—to S. Petronio in Bologna, to the cathedral of Milan: the latter a hearth, but isolated and almost without consequences, of late Gothicism due to the presence of northern workmen and exchanges with major transalpine workshops such as Strasbourg and Cologne. Far greater success, however, was found in Italy by Cistercian architecture, not only in the outgrowths from the mother abbey of Cîteaux—Fossanova, Casamari, S. Galgano, S. Maria d'Arborea, etc.—but above all for the developments given it by the Franciscans and Dominicans in the countless buildings they erected in almost every Italian city.

Assisi (v.), begun immediately after the death of St. Francis, bears the imprint of an improvisational, non-professional genius, perhaps that of Brother Elias himself, who happily fused disparate elements: motifs of local tradition, echoes of Eastern visions, suggestions of French Gothic, in the bold and intensely spiritual conception of two different spatial rhythms whose contrast is resolved in the upper part, completed after Elias's fall in a more decisively Gothic manner by a brilliant architect, almost certainly Filippo da Campello, who later partly repeats its forms in S. Chiara. And it is truly remarkable the affinity with the nearly contemporary Ste-Chapelle, not only in the fundamental idea of the two superimposed volumes but also and above all in the proportions of the upper nave and the treatment of the originally polychrome decoration of the members. But in Assisi, always in keeping with Italian taste, the setting is defined much more clearly and "perspectivally," in its cross-like form with broad transepts, for the greater concrete solidity of the walls, only partially opened to narrative windows of perhaps French origin, and instead decorated over large stretches, in the Italian Romanesque tradition, by the famous frescoes. Another curious synthesis of Romanesque motifs (the gabled façade), Venetian-Byzantine (the domes), Gothic (the peribolos and radiating chapels), and even Islamic (minarets) is S. Antonio in Padua, evidence of the breadth and freedom of culture of the Franciscan builders: not without perhaps some relation to Poitiers and the strangely Orientalizing Périgord.

But, in general, Franciscan and Dominican churches tend to model themselves rather on the Cistercian type, with a triple (or sometimes single) nave without a triforium, sometimes replaced by a gallery; a transept on which chapels are often arranged in a very numerous series on the east side, and sometimes also opened opposite them on the west and raised above the north and south ends. Vaulted ceilings are reserved, to the praise of the Lord, for the main chapel, sometimes for the minor ones and the side aisles. But the central nave, precisely out of an expressed purpose of humility, is almost constantly covered, according to the basilica usage, with exposed trusses. A typical example is the Franciscan S. Croce in Florence, with its Dominican twin.

With the renunciation of vaulting the vast spaces of the main nave, the very first reason for the entire Gothic system is, in essence, lacking, and with it that impulse toward plasticity which has been noted in II. Thus, even more than in the Cistercian, the parietal values of line and surface re-emerge to the forefront, with the adoption of Gothic novelties restricted mainly to the decorative field. And thus is explained the very particular aspect which Gothic assumes in Italy: diminished predominance of vertical developments in relation to horizontal ones, persistent prevalence of painted decoration in fresco over sculptural and stained-glass narrative, the use of which is very scarce; extreme rarity of flying buttresses, pinnacles, and spires. This taste is also reflected in the façades, in which towers are lacking, and above all the motif of portals is reduced to modest proportions, an element that in France shapes the front of cathedrals in a tumult of vigorous plastic and chiaroscuro effects, while in Italy there is a spreading out in surface through broad partitions that sometimes combine highly poetic figurations of flat geometry. One need only consider the wonderfully harmonious and complex composition of the façade of Siena Cathedral, a design imitated by Maitani in Orvieto. In Florence Cathedral, Arnolfo di Cambio, while drawing on the Gothic patrimony, harks back to ancient sources of inspiration from classical Tuscan Romanesque or even paleo-Christian, while clearly foreshadowing the Renaissance.

In conclusion, then, Gothic in Italian architecture, rather than an internal evolution of style as in France, can be considered a true fracture of tradition, through the adoption of forms coming from abroad: a crisis, though not deep nor lasting, motivated by external causes.

A more intimate and convinced adherence to Gothic taste is found in northern Italy and in Siena. Certainly the contribution of the Gothic idiom is perceptible in the art of Siena; but above all, civil architecture develops its own type of construction for houses and palaces, which is a straightforward free interpretation of Cistercian principles and so identifies with Sienese taste and endures tenaciously that the expansion of the upper floors of the Palazzo Pubblico was carried out, in the mid-17th century, with such fidelity to the traditional style as to achieve perfect homogeneity.

The Po Valley in Italy is naturally more exposed to Northern and Gothic influence. Gothic preferences persist for a long time, intertwining in the 15th century with Renaissance currents of Tuscan origin. A typical example is the art and theory of Filarete, and the rather hybrid art of the Certosa of Pavia. Particular styles emerge from the extensive use of brickwork and terracotta ornaments, especially in the lower part of the plain; in Lombardy, these are associated with graffiti decorations sparsely scattered on plaster; elsewhere, and especially in the Treviso Marca, with frescoes featuring fake tapestries, or fake bricks in various combinations, or fake colored and carved marbles—a cost-effective translation of Venice’s rich marble decoration. In Venice, where there had been a 14th-century Gothic-Byzantine phase with the Dalle Masegne and the ivories of the Embriachi (a position analogous to that of Maestro Paolo in painting), and, in reflection, in the Veneto, Gothic art in its flamboyant phase enjoyed a lush and long flowering. This was contributed to by direct Northern influences, exchanges with the Milanese workshop, but also by the activity of local stonecutters, including the Bon family, who remained steadfastly loyal to Gothic tradition even when Tuscan influences had early on offered stimulating models of the new style. Characteristics of Venice are the church facades, mostly in brick, with a crowning of varied shapes, a decorative setting almost devoid of structural function. But especially in civil architecture, late Gothic left memorable examples, from the Doge’s Palace to the Ca’ d’Oro. Yet one must admit that in the Doge’s Palace, the long experience of Venetian architects in loggias and porticoes achieved the almost miraculous result of walls that seem to defy normal static laws.

As regards sculpture as an autonomous art, one may repeat that in Italy Gothic represents a sudden deviation. The sharp stylistic break between the two great Pisanos, father and son, suffices to illustrate this. Nicola, with his highly personal sense of plasticity heightened into an almost barbaric violence, and with a culture drawing largely from the classical and Paleochristian repertoire; Giovanni with the fleeting variety of aspects and the warmth of affections in a flowing plastic wave, as if still alive, frozen in the firm hardness of the material. A plastic wave in a sculptural language that turns decidedly toward the pictorial, while offering greater abundance and agility of expressive means to the heightened pathetic intensity of psychological content. This is precisely what was recognized in French sculpture in its mature phase, which also corresponds precisely to the moment of its greatest contacts with Italian art. In any case, the break between Nicola’s style and Giovanni’s is unmistakable, and it is precisely to the intervention of various young disciples, and above all Giovanni, that the change seen in the pulpit of Siena is due (cf. the Madonna in the trumeau of the north transept door of Notre Dame in Paris, akin to Giovanni’s Madonnas).

Even Arnolfo, in his activity as a sculptor, seems to have known the great art of France (one may compare the Stories of the Virgin for the facade of Santa Maria del Fiore with the Nativity from the pulpit of Chartres), but with a lingering of archaizing accents.

Pisan sculpture, through the authority of Giovanni and the industry of his closest followers, promoted the Gothic fashion throughout Italy, spreading into Northern Italy and enduring over time, especially in the workshop of Milan Cathedral, eventually meeting with those decorative currents active in Venice.

In the territories more properly Gothic, the great extent and importance assumed by stained glass nearly extinguished wall painting, which it replaced. Wall painting is almost nonexistent; rare exceptions include some allegorical-political depictions in public palaces or renewed decorations in preserved earlier buildings. The few French examples, such as the Virgin and Apostles of Lavandieu (late 12th century), show a delayed trend with a predominant Byzantine influence akin to that of Margaritone or the Master of the Bigallo in Italy. Equally rare are the panel paintings found especially in Germanic lands (e.g., the famous Clarissan Altarpiece in Cologne). The only piece on which one can form a concept of French Gothic painting is the relatively late antependium of Narbonne, with Stories of the Passion. Similarly, the few altar panels aim to simulate the enamels they economically replace, and even the Verdun altarpiece may be considered essentially a large-scale transposition of a series of miniatures. Enamels are another of the medieval artistic productions that, already flourishing earlier, continued into the Gothic period (Limoges); they also, moreover, due to affinities of material and effects, once again recall stained glass, in their juxtaposition of flat, vitreous chromatic zones sealed by strong metallic contours. But even for the art of illumination, one must refer to the innermost norm of stained glass art, which may therefore be considered the paradigm on which, more or less, all the various branches of Gothic pictorial language are modeled. A world seen predominantly in terms of its limiting values (surface, line) rather than volume: and consequently a representation that, dispensing with plastic means (chiaroscuro), is content with flat color fields and contour definitions; an exaltation, in the end, of line as an expressive means. Thus in stained glass, thus in enamels, and thus in illumination. Given this stylistic tendency in Gothic illumination, one will observe that, once again, it developed almost imperceptibly from the modes of Romanesque pen illustration. But with a marked attenuation of plastic notations. This elementary technique continued particularly in England and Germany, developing, especially for non-figurative initials, motifs already used, for example, in the work of the Reichenau scriptorium.

But here in Paris, in the service of a flourishing book industry around the University—especially for the production of theological and legal texts—the art of illumination flourished with indescribable splendor, creating a type of decoration that, though harmoniously rich and elegant, remained peculiar to the capital, even if imitated elsewhere.

The contacts that Parisian illumination undoubtedly had with the Bolognese school did not give rise

Fruitful grafts, at best, into rather hybrid amalgams. Bolognese codices of the Bononiensis type could be sent to Paris for illustration work; French illuminators (as well as professors and students) were certainly present in Bologna. This explains how some Bolognese legal codices are decorated in the French manner: some have gatherings in the French style alternating with Bolognese gatherings; in others the two styles mingle on the same page, yet without blending. There is only one small and select group of Bolognese codices in which French models are assimilated with great conviction and notable skill, albeit with a Petronian accent. This is the sole moment that can be considered one of effective French influence on Bolognese illumination: a moment which, according to D’Ancona’s hypothesis, seems reasonably alluded to by Dante’s reference to “aluminare… in Parisi,” coinciding with the activity of Oderisi of Gubbio, in contrast to that of Franco of Bologna, who rather represents the new trends strongly rooted at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Conversely, it is likely that these very Bolognese innovations provided the decisive stimulus for the art of the *Maître aux boqueteaux*.

In Siena, on the other hand, Parisian illumination appears to have offered stylistic motifs capable of independent development. Indeed, Sienese painting prefers expressive means such as the vibrant line and the flatness of decorative color. Duccio, after his initial Byzantine-inflected culture, later draws on Gothic experiences, particularly in the fluidity of the contour line, as seen not only in the *Maestà* but also in the *Madonna of the Franciscans* (much more likely a late work than an early one), where the checkered background, though used with quite a different pictorial intent from French backgrounds, is revealing. Duccio’s Gothicism may also have been influenced by the art of Giovanni Pisano.

One of the most exquisite and original Gothic artists, indeed the greatest Gothic painter, is undoubtedly Simone Martini, whereas Giotto cannot be considered a Gothic artist but rather one who heralds the Renaissance.

A Gothic vein later penetrates Florentine painting through Sienese examples, and through the refined and melancholic decadentism of Agnolo Gaddi, it culminates at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century in the exaggerated stylization of Lorenzo Monaco.

Simone Martini’s stay in Avignon in the final years of his life culminates in a fusion of two kindred cultures: French Gothic and Sienese Gothic. The former had reached an extreme maturity after nearly two centuries of fertile creativity, while the latter derived from the former but developed along entirely original lines.

Thus Gothic art evolves into the so-called “International Gothic,” as universally accepted terminology designates II. And upon the now mannered and abstractly decorative refinements of old Gothic, there is grafted the taste and demands of the new times of the impending Renaissance. Yet this naturalism of International Gothic has a character that distinguishes it from the Renaissance variety and finds correspondence, on one hand, with other trends in fourteenth-century Paduan painting (especially Tommaso da Modena) and, on the other, with the fundamental Northern taste (particularly Flemish), namely, an interest in nature as content rather than form: an analytical naturalism, therefore, indifferent to the problems of synthetic reconstruction.

This movement originates in Burgundy, a meeting point of Italian, Flemish, and northern French currents, within the artistic climate fostered by the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy, centered in Dijon, and of Berry, centered in Bourges. The art of Claus Sluter is but one aspect of this trend in sculpture. For the same Charterhouse of Champmol, Melchior Broederlam (1392–99) painted the outer shutters of the carved wooden altarpiece by Jacques de Baerze (1391) with *Scenes from the Infancy of Christ*, one of the rare surviving early French panels and a cornerstone of this art. The masterpiece of this movement is the *Très Riches Heures* of Jean de Berry, illuminated in the early fifteenth century by the Limbourg brothers. This current, born at the close of the fourteenth century, did not last long in its most typical manifestations beyond 1420, yet it spread across Europe and found immediate resonance in Italy, especially in the Po Valley, due to its great affinity with Lombard, Emilian, Veronese, and even Marche and Tuscan tastes.

A particularly typical example of this style is the decoration of Torre Aquila in Trento, datable, according to Raimo’s findings, to 1407 or slightly earlier, which expands upon the traditional theme of the months. A work with predominantly Lombard influence, it shows very close ties to the art of tapestry (another flourishing artistic industry of the time, in Arras and Brussels) in its composition, where a bird’s-eye view is inserted into a predominantly decorative framework, a kind of disarticulated and recomposed perspective in cellular form, with scattered figural episodes within the flat, patterned landscape.

This composite taste tends to resolve itself into its components. In Italy it quickly turns toward the Renaissance in what Longhi aptly calls its “Umbra” phase: suffice it to consider the transition from Masolino to Masaccio, from Sassetta to Domenico di Bartolo, the developments of Pisanello, and even Domenico Veneziano, who, in his Pianello formation, is directly linked to this International Gothic. Elsewhere, however, it veers more toward the Gothic pole. This is the case in Spain, in its two main Valencian and Catalan schools, already much influenced by Siena; along the Rhine and the Danube. Indeed, even the art of the Van Eycks arises from this same ground and develops in perfect coherence with the fundamental Gothic directives toward a particularizing naturalism that cannot reasonably be termed Renaissance (the so-called Flemish Renaissance). It is this same spirit that asserts itself in the two great Germans, Conrad Witz and Hans Multscher, and in Lucas Moser. In Austria, more specifically French forms penetrate with the novel master of Heiligenkreuz and also with that of Castle Tyrol, more generically international with the Master of St Lambrecht, or Hans von Tübingen, and they meet with the older Bohemian school (Theodoricus of Prague, etc.), flourishing from the mid-fourteenth century under multiple cultural stimuli (Avignonese, Italian, especially Emilian) and branching out even into northern Germany with Meister Bertram in Hamburg. The Bohemian school, in its search for the characteristic, tends at times to accentuate, in a sometimes crudely grotesque manner, the mimetic impressionism of Tommaso da Modena.

And it is precisely this taste for representation that persists for a long time; a typical expression of it, even technically apt, is the association of painting and sculpture in the widespread use of wooden altarpieces (with ramifications in Carnia and other Alpine regions). In this context, the materially illusionistic aims inherent in the coloring of reliefs strangely combine with the most extreme anatomical and mimetic distortions.

Gothicism—which, as has also been seen in the case of architecture, seems an ineradicable foundation for the inspiration of the northern peoples (so much so that Gothic and northernness almost coincide)—and which constantly resurfaces even beneath superficially Renaissance Mediterranean cultural layers. It therefore shines through in the works of artists more closely tied, by reasons of education and territorial proximity, to Italian art, such as Michele Pacher, who undoubtedly knew Padua, and even more overwhelmingly in his lesser-known brother Federico, who must have known Loreto and who, not by chance, aligns himself with those Italians of Nordic temperament such as Crivelli and Alunno. It remains the constant ferment in Dürer despite his fleeting Italian experiences; and above all, expressed in a power of luminous meteors truly cosmic, in a biting torment of line, and in a harrowing chromatic agitation that drags one toward the most hallucinatory visions—sometimes reaching the highest levels—of Grünewald, Altdorfer, and the others of the Danube School. And finally, it is still this Gothic spirit that reappears, albeit in far less elevated and vainly classicizing exercises, in the mannerists of Antwerp and their affiliates, and in the creations of lofty Italian spirits such as Lotto and Pontormo at a critical moment of the Renaissance. — See plates LXVI–LXXI.