Gothic, Art

GOTHIC, ART. - The designation "Gothic," more properly applied in origin to ogival architecture, but later extended to all the arts of that period, goes back to the mature Italian Renaissance (Vasari) and, in its historical inaccuracy, implies a judgment: the negative judgment of classical-Renaissance and Mediterranean taste — including French taste in the 16th-18th centuries — in comparison with the medieval and northern creations that had most manifestly expressed themselves in architecture. The term, however inaccurate, remains in current use; the judgment is reversed with the rise of Romantic taste.

This art is truly the last manifestation of medieval civilization, which in it reached a perfect expressive equilibrium.

This accounts for two characteristic traits that appear fundamental in the physiognomy of the Gothic.

The first is the spontaneity of the evolutionary process by which the new figurative language seems to detach itself from the old almost imperceptibly. There is no crisis of the Romanesque from which the Gothic is born: rather it is the Romanesque that ends by dissolving into the new style through a long and almost insensible lysis. The other fundamental character of the Gothic is its refined mannerism; when this term is understood as a fully valid imaginative procedure, which seeks its motivations in previous experiences, through a slow and subtle stylistic elaboration of themes, schemes, and ideal types. In this respect there is a sort of analogy between Gothic art and classical art, when classicism is taken as a stylistic category, as a mode of being of the imagination and not as a historical determination. An art, then, knowingly reflective and saturated with culture — not only figurative, but also literary and above all religious. Intellectualism, therefore, which can still be compared to that of the Renaissance, albeit antithetical in its

they reject this etymology), the diagonal rib, reinforcing the vaults, to increase their load-bearing strength.

It is not yet clear whether this element, which is the key to the whole system, already appears precociously in Italy in the oldest parts of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan or in San Flaviano at Montefiascone; but it is certain that here such a structural idea remained sterile, whereas it becomes a seed that germinates and develops with wonderful luxuriance in France, precisely in the heart of the Île-de-France, which, after the tribulations of the 10th century, was moving toward a new splendid period of ordered prosperity: it is the time in which the political power that wisely administers the country, and the religious authority, organized in firm hierarchies around the bishops, equally promote the great undertakings of culture, with the institution of the Universitas Studiorum, and of the arts, with the construction of superb cathedrals, ever more often dedicated to the Virgin, devotion to whom steadily increases between the 12th and 13th centuries. It is also the time of the composition of the great epic songs of the Carolingian cycle and of the fixing of a literary language. And it is the time of the Crusades, which bring extensive contacts, and not only conflict, with the East, and therefore a new wealth and variety of cultural experiences.

In this most fortunate conjuncture, the technical motif of the reinforcing rib attains the most extraordinary possibilities of development.

Already used extensively within the old Romanesque schemes (for example, by William of Sens in the Cathedral of his city, in the second quarter of the 12th century), it is destined to radically transform imagination and technique, to formulate a new poetics of architecture, to determine indeed a new conception of space.

But a pointed arch does not yet mean, strictly speaking, an acute arch, although later in current usage the terms pointed,

A third characteristic, finally, of Gothic art is the tendency by which every particular language (architecture, sculpture, painting) shifts its center, axis, guiding line, its "property" in short, toward the limit of the contiguous language: architecture thus turns toward the plastic, sculpture toward the pictorial, painting toward the architectonic.

This ever greater preponderance of plastic values in architecture finds its root in that tectonic device from which, during more than a century of admirable creative fervor, the whole most daring organism of Gothic architecture develops: that is, the arcus augivus (but now some scholars re-

acute and Gothic have ended up being equivalent and confused. The acute or "equilateral" arch (deriving from the intersection of two round arches), not unknown to Eastern architecture, had already found abundant employment, out of a taste for decorative variety rather than structural necessity, in Romanesque Burgundian architecture (Cluny, Autun, Paray-le-Monial, etc.); but only when this acute profile is applied to the rib, to the ogive, is its full tectonic value understood, in its capacity to bear a load the greater the smaller its lateral thrust. Hence a series of ingenious solutions to the problem of ever more neutralizing, by verticalizing it, this dangerous lateral thrust: the "arcs boutants," replacing the Romanesque buttresses; the very robust knot of the keystones; the pinnacles and spires intended to overload the piers, increasing their vertical thrust to absorb the lateral one. Thus the task of covering the whole building with stone material is facilitated, the true construction being reduced to the skeleton: architectural value is decisively shifted from the walls to the ribs, from surfaces to volumes.

On these principles the activity of the builders interweaves poetic intuitions with technical conquests and elaborates an organic system admirable for resistance and for elasticity in a play of equilibria, favored also by the quality of the stone material from the various French quarries.

The technical possibilities offered by the acute arch, by now closely linked to the ogive, stimulate architects to a contest of height: the mirage that attracts them is one of the fascinations of this architecture. Upward soaring, intoxication with the vertical, which, in the "vulgaris opinio," would be the typical expression of medieval mysticism. An opinion to be accepted not without many reservations. Since, if anything, in these new stylistic attitudes one should see the expression of the new tastes and aspirations of collective life; a more agile rhythm, a freer breath, a more serene tone; especially if one keeps in mind one of the most vivid demands, and one of the most certain results, of this new style: the luminosity of the interiors. In any case, what is usually designated as the expression of the sense of the infinite would better be defined as the representation of the indefinite.

Indeed, once the perimeter masonry has been emptied of its original architectural value, of its meaning as surface, and the whole tectonic function transferred to the essential fabric of the building's members, the solid walls can be eroded by windows, swallowed by the void, until they disappear entirely as in the Ste-Chapelle of Paris, which is merely an enormous, wondrous reliquary of transparent glass.

On the other hand, however much reduced to their pure necessity, piers and ribs increasingly assume a more evident importance in the economy of the buildings and acquire, with functional predominance, an autonomous existence of their own and an ever more distinct and substantial individuality. The building thus resolves into a modulation of masses alternately full and empty, and the architectural imagination takes concrete form in the effects of the atmospheric "medium," variously illuminated and colored in relation to the stone 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, which, at the top, open into star-like ramifications intersecting in a dense network so as to constitute an open and indefinite rhythm that absorbs naves, transepts, choir, and radiating apse into a single flux and annuls every spatial distinction. A continuous rhythm, whose development concludes with perfect coherence in the circularity of the ambulatory choir. This is a motif that, like many others, Gothic takes from the Romanesque-monastic architecture of the north, especially Cluniac, developing it according to its own principles, in the circuit of the peribolos and in the wheel of chapels radiating around the sanctuary.

In this spatial conception, sculptural decoration asserts itself with ever greater independ-

dence, no longer merely clothing the surface of the architectural structure, but associating itself with it in an integral synthesis, and with its wealth of movement contributes to the multiplication of chiaroscuro effects.

But above all, it is the decoration of the storied stained-glass windows that is effective in creating that life of atmospheric masses — the great art born precisely as the necessary corollary of architecture; stained glass and miniature — which, as will be seen, are stylistically akin — are the true painting of the Gothic.

The figurative web of the stories is evidently nothing but the pretext for a symphonic composition of colour that is doubly valid: through transparency, as a medium between the two different luminous potentials of the interior and the exterior, and through dilution, inasmuch as the density of the interior penumbra is wholly imbued with and tinged by the light that the exterior pours into it.

The Gothic cathedral is the supreme and consummate masterpiece that dominates the panorama of French art, also from the urbanistic point of view. And it is almost moving to see how, from afar, in the profile of French cities and villages, the cathedral towers over the crowd of little houses that cluster around it and protects them and, almost like a mother, broods over them. A sign of the times!

Such a rich and mighty synthesis of figurative languages surely reaches the summits of art as the full and perfect expression of a truly cosmic feeling. And, in truth, the intimate motivation of the imagination of these artists is precisely one of the most solemn natural spectacles: that of the forest, understood not as a model but as a module. The forest in its character of boundless grandeur, dominating and at the same time liberating. A comparison, moreover an obvious one, that already appears in the Romantic writers, from Forster to Chateaubriand.

Born in the womb of the Romanesque, Gothic architecture, after a beginning in which the old schemes resist intermingled with the new, increasingly defines its fundamental characteristics in works where the new language now expresses itself in all its purity: Notre-Dame of Paris can be considered the example of achieved perfection in this type of construction. The cathedral of Amiens has been called the "Parthenon" of the Gothic.

These constructions, in the second half of the 12th century and throughout the whole of the 13th, are founded and grow both in the great centres and in the small towns and villages. Colossal undertakings in which all social classes and sometimes several generations collaborate, which therefore bear in their details the imprint of the evolution of the style, while almost always preserving a marvellous unity of the whole, and take shape in a variety of regional schools through the influence of local traditions of taste and the different genius of the architects (Île-de-France, Soissonnais, Champagne, Bourgogne, Normandy).

Beyond these 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 all France, and then, with ever greater differentiations, throughout all Europe, and prolongs it unchallenged until the whole of the 14th century and a good part of the 15th and, especially in Germanic lands, well into the 16th, even into the so-called German Renaissance. And so congenial does this language appear to German taste in particular and to Northern taste in general, that, after the almost universal triumph of the Italianizing mannerism of the second half of the 16th century, at the beginning of the 17th one sees a sudden rekindling of it which, latent in France in especially civil works of the style of Henry IV and Louis XIII, declares itself instead explicitly in buildings in Germany, such as the Jesuit church at Cologne, built in the early years of the 17th century, in a Gothic that may be called "posthumous", at Würzburg, at Dettelbach, at Prague, at Fribourg in Switzerland. Nor is that enough, for there is the case of the Baroque-Gothic of the Italo-Bohemian Giovanni Santini Aichel, who in Bohemia in the early 18th century translates the Baroque spirit into Gothic letter. To which case that of Borromini is not extraneous (whose approximations to the "Gothic manner" Baldinucci already pointed out) and that of Guarini, who in 1679 designed a Gothicizing church façade for the Theatines of Prague. Not to mention, then, the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic return, in part a spontaneous manifestation of Romantic inspiration, in part an artifice of a cultural character.

The happy spontaneity of conception through which structure and decoration were born at a stroke and were realized in an always balanced synthesis of essential values, gradually yields to an ever more laborious search for accessories, to a passion for superficial decorative values, which ends by weakening the sinew of structural invention, by distorting the sense of material, by reducing architecture to embroidery or goldsmith's work.

The poetics of these artists of the Late Gothic — or "flamboyant" — consequently flows into the academic. Examples of this stage are, in France, the "Brou" of Bourg (1512-32); outside it, the cathedral of Burgos or that of Milan. And 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 current.

The golden period of the Gothic lasts about a century and a half. From the primitive moment of Sens on the plans of William of Sens (also the author of the choir of Canterbury cathedral [beginning ca. 1140]), St-Denis, by the work of Abbot Suger (1140), the first design of Chartres (1145), Etampes (1150), Langres (1150), Senlis (1155), St-Germain-des-Prés (choir, 1157), Laon (1160), Corbeil (1180); to the moment of full blossoming but still fresh and almost contained with Notre-Dame of 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 copious luxuriance of the cathedral of Troyes (1208), of Reims (1211), on a design by Jean d'Orbais, perhaps the most harmoniously balanced masterpiece even in the extraordinary richness and complexity of its motifs, of Auxerre (1215), of Amiens (1220), on the plans of Robert de Luzarches, of Strasbourg, on an 11th-century crypt, full 13th century; down to the last models: the Ste-Chapelle, built by St. Louis between 1246 and 1248, and St-Urbain of Troyes, the work of Jean Langlois (1262).

Born in this period, together with or, better, in the bosom of architecture, is Gothic sculpture, and it faithfully follows its evolutionary phases. And true statuary is reborn which, with figures in the round, restores autonomy to sculpture, yet within the ambit of that perfect accord between the two languages that is precisely the characteristic of the style: the western portal of Chartres dating back to 1145, of which some groups of statues remain. The primitive design, through a rapid maturing of taste, barely five years later changes into the far richer one which, having moved the façade a little forward, wants the splays of the two side portals also adorned with statue-columns, which, pressed close to the central one, together form the admirable "Royal Portal". Thus there begins to take shape at Chartres one of the elements which, with the spired towers, will become essential in the organism of the cathedral. In the "portal of the kings" a first group of sculptors already foreshadows the new times. But their work must soon have appeared backward in comparison with that of another workshop more decisively modern; then the first yields and moves to Etampes. The second workshop, the true renewer, which had probably worked shortly before on the central portal of St-Denis, completes perhaps with other collaborations the "portal of the kings".

In still immature forms work the sculptors of the single-door portal of Senlis.

The most dazzling phase of Gothic sculpture is that which begins after 1194 with the rebuilding of Chartres, when the importance of the north and south transepts grows so much as to require their completion by means of other true façades, adorned with portals and statues. And it is this slightly archaizing character that distinguishes the school of Chartres from the school of Paris, especially in the two other portals of Notre-Dame, from that of Amiens, from that of Reims, which already makes the mannerist phase appear almost imminent.

Criticism, especially French criticism, believes it can discern the distinctive mark of the Gothic renewal in sculpture in a sense of tranquillity, in full contrast with the so-called "style spirituel" of the Romanesque period of the neighboring Burgundian school (Autun, Vézelay, etc.).

A sense of calm and decorum, of which examples are the "Visitation" of Reims, the supreme ideal beauty of the "Beau Dieu" of Amiens, or the purity of certain little nudes, truly Praxitelean, in the "Stories of the Creation" at the Ste-Chapelle. A stylistic attitude that is the adequate artistic expression of a whole new economic-social-political situation with new tastes and new aspirations, which also finds on the cultural plane a concrete and precise classical motivation in the direct knowledge of examples of ancient art.

The classical example is, evidently, the living ferment in Provençal sculpture (St-Gilles, Arles). And it is certain that a tenacious vein of classicism - albeit with accents of a Celtic dialect - nourishes the inspiration of the neighboring Auvergnat sculptors, in many respects akin to the Lombards. And in any case there was no lack of monuments of ancient plastic art in the Ile-de-France itself, and they abounded, besides the south, in the neighboring regions of the Middle Rhine, the Meuse, the Moselle. The "Visitation" of Reims proves it, if nothing else. But above all it is admissible that the renewed contact with the East and with the refined

Byzantine culture of the Macedonian period, bound to classical sources by a tradition that not even iconoclasm had been able to sever entirely, offered artists examples of a beauty so different from that mostly pursued in the Western Middle Ages (cf. the "Beau Dieu" of Amiens with the Christ in the "Harbaville Triptych"). This new style tends to become complicated on the one hand with an ever more detailed — and therefore, in the end, more superficial — observation of natural reality, on the other with an ever greater richness of pathetic content. The growing search for characteristic determinations culminates in a revived interest in portraiture, so that from the still entirely generic depictions of the oldest royal, princely or episcopal tombs with recumbent statues (e.g., of the abbey of Fontevrault and those dedicated by St. Louis at St-Denis) one passes to the stupendous characterizations of the great unknown master of Naumburg. From the lively portraits sculpted by Peter Parler, architect of the cathedral of Prague, to the many statues of Charles V (especially that work of André Beauneveu [1364] in the more recent series at St-Denis); to the creations of Claus Sluter (Portal of the charterhouse of Champmol and there too the "puits de Moyse", after 1389). Beauneveu, who was also a miniaturist, and Sluter, Dutch by birth and Franco-Flemish by culture, already partake of the tastes and stylistic attitudes of the so-called "International Gothic". Before which it will be fitting to make mention of "Cistercian Gothic".
A reaction to the splendor of Cluniac architecture (Cluny was, until the rebuilding of St. Peter's in Rome, the largest church in Christendom), which was nevertheless not only an ostentation of luxury and magnificence, but an organic complexity and refinement of culture, Cistercian Gothic realizes this demand for essentiality with fuller adherence to the modes proper to architectural language, that is, in function of a true and proper spatial configuration, of the delimitation of spaces, and without that shift of stylistic tones toward the plastic sector that has been noted in the other current of Gothic, that of the cathedrals. The accent of this peculiar Cistercian voice of Gothic thus returns to the values of line and surface, in the rigid hardness of sharp profiles, in the fairly broad expanse of the walls, in the quadrangular plan of the chapels and of the chevet, in place of the broken and jagged course of the polygonal apses and radiating chapels.

The result is a clear design that absorbs into the new functionality of Gothic structure remote Early Christian basilical motifs.

It is obvious therefore that such a spatial conception, on the one hand proves suited to the new directions of monasticism, on the other becomes particularly fruitful in Italian soil. Quite rare, here, are works of pure Gothic, 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 far from the Cistercian), to S. Francesco in Bologna — one of the few examples of a plan with an ambulatory and a ring of apse chapels — to S. Petronio also in Bologna, to the cathedral of Milan: a hearth, the latter, but isolated and almost without consequences, of late Gothicizing due to the presence of northern workshops, and the exchanges with the great transalpine building sites such as Strasbourg and Cologne.

Far greater fortune was found instead in Italy by Cistercian architecture, not only in the offshoots from the mother abbey of Cîteaux, Fossanova, Casamari, S. Galgano, S. Maria d'Arbona, etc., but above all for the developments given to it by the Franciscans and Dominicans in the very numerous buildings that they went on constructing in almost every Italian city.

The basilica of 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, which happily fuses 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 from whose contrast is expressed a sense of ascension, of liberation.

A design that, after the fall of Brother Elias, finds completion in its upper part, more decisively Gothic, through the work of a brilliant architect, almost certainly Filippo di Campello, who then partly repeats its forms in S. Chiara. And truly remarkable is the affinity with the nearly contemporary Ste-Chapelle, not only in the fundamental idea of the two superimposed spaces, but also and above all in the proportions of the upper nave and in the manner of decoration of the originally polychrome members. But at Assisi, still in keeping with Italian taste, the space defines itself much more clearly and "perspectivally", in its cruciform shape with wide transepts, through the greater concrete solidity of the walls, only partially opened to storied windows perhaps of French origin, and instead for broad stretches decorated, according to the Italian Romanesque tradition, by the famous frescoes.

Another curious synthesis of Romanesque (the gabled façade), Veneto-Byzantine (the domes), Gothic (the ambulatory and radiating chapels) and even Islamic (minarets) motifs is S. Antonio in Padua, testi-

evidence of the breadth and freedom of culture of the Franciscan builders: not without perhaps some relation to Poitiers and the curiously orientalizing Périgord.

But, in general, the Franciscan and Dominican churches tended to model themselves rather on the Cistercian type, with a triple (and sometimes single) nave without triforium, sometimes replaced by a gallery; a transept onto which the chapels open in a series often very numerous on the eastern side, and sometimes others also open, facing those, on the western side and in raised position on the north and south ends. The roofing is at times reserved, in praise of the Lord, to the main chapel, sometimes to the lesser chapels and to the side naves. But the central nave, precisely out of an express intention of humility, is almost constantly covered, according to the basilical custom, with trusses, which however are left exposed without coffering. A typical example is the Franciscan S. Croce in Florence, with its Dominican twin S. Maria Novella, only a little richer.

With the renunciation of vaulting in stone the vast spaces of the main nave, there is in substance lacking at the root the primary reason for the entire Gothic system, and with it there also fails that impulse toward plasticity that has been noted in that system. Thus, even better than in the Cistercian, the parietal values of line and surface reappear in the foreground, the adoption of Gothic novelties being restricted predominantly to the decorative field. And thus is explained the wholly particular aspect that Gothic gradually assumes in Italy: diminished predominance of vertical developments in relation to horizontal ones, persistent prevalence of pictorial decoration in fresco over sculptural decoration and over that of historiated stained-glass windows, the use of which is very scanty; extreme rarity of flying buttresses, pinnacles, spires. To this taste also correspond the facades in which towers are lacking, and above all the motif of the portals is reduced to modest proportions, an element which in France shapes the front of cathedrals all in a tumult of vigorous plastic and chiaroscuro effects, whereas in Italy there is a spreading out on the surface through broad compartments that combine together figurations sometimes highly poetic of planar geometry. Let one consider the wonderfully harmonious and complex structure of the facade of the Siena Cathedral, a design imitated by Maitani at Orvieto. In the Florence Cathedral, Arnolfo di Cambio, while drawing on the Gothic heritage, goes back to ancient sources of inspiration of the classicizing Tuscan Romanesque or indeed even of the Early Christian, while clearly preluding the Renaissance.

In conclusion, therefore, the Gothic in Italian architecture, rather than an internal evolution of style as in France, can be considered a true rupture of tradition, through the adoption of forms that came from outside: a crisis, however much 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 language is perceptible in the art of Siena; but above all civil building elaborates its own type of construction for houses and palaces, which is a genuine free interpretation of Cistercian principles and so identifies itself with Sienese taste and endures so tenaciously that the enlargement of the upper storeys of the Palazzo comunale is carried out, in the full seventeenth century, with such fidelity to the traditional style as to achieve a perfect homogeneity there.

The Po Valley is naturally more exposed to the northern and Gothic influence. Gothic preferences last a long time, until in the fifteenth century they interweave with the Renaissance currents of Tuscan origin. A typical example is the art and theory of Filarete, and the rather hybrid art of the Certosa di Pavia. Particular attitudes result from the wide use of brick masonry and terracotta ornaments, especially in the lower part of the plain; associated, in Lombardy, with graffiti decorations sparsely scattered on the plaster; elsewhere, and especially in the Treviso March, with frescoes with feigned tapestries, or feigned bricks in the most varied combinations, or feigned colored and carved marbles, the latter an economical translation of the rich marble decoration of Venice. In Venice, where there had been a fourteenth-century Gothic-Byzantine phase with the Dalle Masegne and the ivories of the Embriachi (a position analogous to that of Master Paolo in painting) and, by reflection, in the Veneto, the Gothic in its flamboyant phase had a luxuriant and long flowering. Direct northern contributions, exchanges with the Milanese workshop, but also the activity of local stonecutters contributed to it, among whom the Bon family, most faithful to the Gothic tradition even when Tuscan contributions had precociously offered stimulating models of the new style. Characteristic of Venice are the facades of churches, mostly in terracotta, with a mixtilinear pediment, a decorative backdrop almost without structural function. But especially in civil architecture the late Gothic has left memorable examples, from the Doge's Palace to the Ca' d'Oro. But it must also be said that in the Doge's Palace the long experience of Venetian architects in the matter of loggias and porticoes achieves the almost miraculous result of walls that seem to defy the normal laws of statics.

Also as regards sculpture as an autonomous art, it may be repeated that, in Italy, the Gothic represents a sudden deviation. For this purpose the sharp stylistic detachment between the two great Pisanos, father and son, suffices. Nicola, with his highly personal sense of plasticity exasperated into an almost barbaric violence, and with a culture that draws its formulas largely from the classical and early Christian repertoire; Giovanni with the fleeting variety of aspects and the warmth of affections in a flowing plastic wave congealed, yet as if still alive, in the firm hardness of the material. A plastic wave in a sculptural language that turns decisively toward the pictorial, while offering greater abundance and agility of expressive means to the increased pathetic intensity of the psychological content. Which is precisely what has been recognized in French sculpture in its phase of maturity, which also corresponds precisely to the moment of its greatest contacts with Italian art. In any case, the caesura between the style of Nicola and that of Giovanni is most certain, and it is precisely to the intervention of the various young disciples, and above all of Giovanni, that the change recognized in the pulpit of Siena is due (cf. the Madonna in the trumeau of the north transept door of Notre-Dame in Paris with the type of the Madonnas of Giovanni).

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

Pisan sculpture, through the authority of Giovanni and the industry of his closest followers, promoted the Gothic fashion from one end of Italy to the other, spread into northern Italy and persisted over time, especially in the workshop of the Milan cathedral, ending by meeting those currents of decorators who were active in Venice.

In the more properly Gothic territories the great extent and importance assumed by stained-glass windows almost entirely extinguished wall painting, which they replaced. It is little less than nonexistent; a rare exception being some allegorical-political depiction in public palaces or the renewal of decorations in preserved earlier buildings. The few French examples, such as the Virgin and Apostles of Lavandieu (late 12th century) show a retardatory direction with a prevailing Byzantine influence akin to an Italian Margaritone or a Master of the Bigallo. Equally rare are the panel paintings to be found especially in German lands (e.g., the famous Altar of the Poor Clares in Cologne). The only piece on which a conception of French Gothic painting can be formed is the relatively late Narbonne hanging, with Stories of the Passion. Likewise the few altarpieces aim to simulate the enamels that they economically replace, and the altar of Verdun itself can be considered in substance a large-scale transposition of a series of miniatures. Enamels are another of the medieval artistic productions that, already flourishing earlier, continue in the Gothic period (Limoges); moreover they too, also through affinity of material and effects, refer once again to stained-glass windows, in their joining of flat vitreous chromatic zones, sealed by vigorous metallic contours. But also for the art of miniature one must refer to the intimate norm of the art of stained-glass windows, which can 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 its values of limit (surface, line) and not of volume: and consequently a representation that, disregarding plastic means (chiaroscuro), is satisfied with flat fields and contour definitions; an exaltation, in the end, of line as an expressive means. So in stained-glass windows, so in enamels, and so in miniature. Once this stylistic tendency is posited in Gothic miniature, it will be observed that, once again, at its origins it develops almost imperceptibly from the modes of Romanesque pen illustration. But with a noticeable attenuation of plastic notations. This elementary technique continues particularly in England and Germany, developing, especially for non-figurative initials, motifs already used, e.g., in the scriptorium of Cluny.

But behold in Paris, in the service of a book industry prospering around the University, especially for the production of theological and legal texts, the art of "illuminating" flourishes with indescribable splendor, creating a type of harmoniously rich and elegant decoration that, though imitated here and there, remains peculiar to the capital.

The contacts that Parisian miniature undoubtedly came to have with Bolognese miniature did not at all give rise to fertile grafts, but at most to rather hybrid amalgams. Codices of litera Bononiensis could be sent to Paris for the work of illustration; French illuminators (as well as professors and students) were certainly present in Bologna. This explains how several Bolognese legal codices are decorated in the French manner: some have French quires alternating with Bolognese quires; in others the two decorations mingle on the same page; but they do not fuse. There is only one small group of Bolognese codices in which the French models are assimilated with great conviction and notable skill, albeit with a Petronian accent. And it is the only moment that can be considered one of effective influence of French miniature on Bolognese: a moment which, according to D'Ancona's hypothesis, seems reasonable — also because of the Dantesque allusion to "illuminating... in Paris" — to make coincide with the activity of Oderisi da Gubbio, as compared with that of Franco Bolognese, the latter rather a representative of the new vividly graphic tendencies at the beginning of the 14th century. And, conversely, it is probable that precisely these new Bolognese modes were the determining stimuli of the art of the "Maître aux boquetaux". In Siena, rather, it seems that Parisian miniature offered motifs of style capable of autonomous developments. And in fact Sienese painting too prefers as expressive means the vibrant line and the superficiality of decorative color. Duccio, on his initially Byzantinizing culture, later availed himself of Gothic experiences, in the fluency, above all, of the contour line, as appears not only in the Maestà but also in the Madonna of the Franciscans (far more probably late than youthful), in which the squared curtain is revealing, although used with an entirely different figurative intent from French backgrounds. To Duccio's Gothicism the art of Giovanni Pisano probably also contributed.

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 an artist who preludes the Renaissance.

A Gothic vein penetrates later into Florentine painting, through Sienese examples, and through the refined and melancholic decadentism of Agnolo Gaddi it flows at the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th into the exasperated stylism of Lorenzo Monaco.

Simone Martini's stay in Avignon, in the last years of his life, culminates in an interweaving of two kindred sculptural traditions: those of French Gothic and Sienese Gothic: the former having reached an extreme maturity in nearly two centuries of fertile creativity, the latter derived from the former, but with contributions and a development entirely its own.

Thus the Gothic evolves into the so-called "International Gothic," according to the universally accepted designation. And upon the now mannered and always abstractly decorative refinements of the old Gothic there is a grafting of the taste and demands of the new times of the imminent Renaissance. But this naturalism of the International Gothic has a character of its own that distinguishes it from the Renaissance one and finds correspondences, on the one hand, with other tendencies of 14th-century Padanian painting (especially that of Tomaso da Modena) and coincides on the other with the fundamental Nordic taste (especially Flemish), namely an interest in nature as content and not as form: an analytical naturalism, therefore, indifferent to the problems of synthetic reconstruction.

This movement originates in Burgundy, the meeting point of Italian, Flemish and northern French currents, in the artistic climate promoted by the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy, with Dijon as its center, and of Berry with Bourges as its center. The art of Claus Sluter is but one aspect of this tendency, in sculpture. For that same charterhouse of Champmol, Melchior Broderlam (1392-99) painted the outer shutters of the wooden altarpiece carved by Jacques de Baerze (1391) with Scenes from the Infancy of Christ, one of the extremely rare early French panels, and a cornerstone of this art. The masterpiece of this current is the book of hours of Jean de Berry illuminated in the early years of the 15th century by the de Limbourg brothers. This current, within the span of a generation — since it was born at the close of the 14th century — does not last, in its most typical manifestations, much beyond 1420, invades all of Europe and immediately finds a broad echo in Italy, especially in the Po Valley, owing to its great congeniality with Lombard, Emilian and Veronese taste, and reaches even the Marches and Tuscany.

A particularly typical example of this style is the decoration of Torre Aquila in Trento, datable, according to Rasmò's clarifications, to 1407 or slightly earlier, which develops with new breadth the traditional theme of the months. A work of predominantly Lombard influence that shows very close relations with the art of tapestry (another artistic industry in great flourishing in these times, Arras, Brussels) in its composition, in which a view from above is inserted into the meshes of a predominantly decorative warp, a sort of disarticulated perspective recomposed as if into honeycombs, with figured episodes scattered within the flat landscape fabric.

This composite taste tends to resolve itself into its components. In Italy it turns rapidly toward the Renaissance in an early phase effectively called "umbrattile" by Longhi: suffice it to reflect on the transition from Masolino to Masaccio, from Sassetta to Domenico di Bartolo, on the developments of Pisanello, and on Domenico Veneziano himself who, in his Pisanello-derived formation, connects precisely to this International Gothic. The latter elsewhere turns rather toward the pole of Gothicism. Thus in Spain, in the two principal schools of Valencia and Catalonia, already much influenced by Siena; along the Rhine and along the Danube. Ultimately the very art of the great Van Eyck is also born on this same ground and develops in perfect coherence with the fundamental Gothic directives, toward a particularistic naturalism that it does not seem reasonable to designate as Renaissance (the so-called Flemish rebirth). And it is still this spirit that asserts itself in the two great Germans Conrad Witz and Hans Multscher and in Lucas Moser. Into Austria penetrate more specifically French forms, with the very remarkable master of Heiligenkreuz and also in that of Castel Tirolo, more generically international with the Master of St Lambrecht, that is Hans von Tübingen, and they meet with the older Bohemian school (Theodoric of Prague, etc.) flourishing from the middle of the 14th century, under multiple cultural stimuli (Avignonese, Italian, especially Emilian) and branching out as far as northern Germany with Meister Bertram in Hamburg. A Bohemian school that in its search for the characteristic tends to accentuate, in a sometimes grossly grotesque sense, the mimetic impressionism of Tomaso da Modena.

And precisely this taste for representation persists for a long time; a typical expression of it, also technically adequate, is the association of painting and sculpture in the extremely widespread use of wooden altarpieces (with ramifications in Carnia and other Alpine regions). In it the materialistically illusionistic intentions, inherent in the coloring of the relief, are strangely associated with the most extreme anatomical and mimetic deformations.

A Gothicism that — as has been seen also for architecture — seems an ineliminable foundation of the inspiration of the Northerners (so that Gothicism and Nordicness almost coincide), and that constantly re-emerges even beneath states of superficially Mediterranean Renaissance culture. It therefore shows through also in the work of artists more bound, by reasons of education and territorial contiguity, to Italian art, such as Michael Pacher, who undoubtedly knew Padua, and even more overwhelmingly in his lesser brother Frederick, who must have known Loreto and who not by chance approaches precisely those Italians of Nordic temperament such as Crivelli and Alunno. It remains the constant ferment of Dürer despite his ephemeral Italian experiences; and above all, expressed in a truly cosmic power of luminous meteors, in a biting torment of line, in a harrowing coloristic agitation, which carry one to the most hallucinatory visions — results sometimes of the highest order — of Grünewald, of Altdorfer and the others of the Danube school. And finally it is still this Gothicism that reappears in the far less lofty exercises, vainly classicizing, of the mannerists of Antwerp and the like, and in the creations of lofty Italian spirits such as Lotto and Pontormo at a critical moment of the Renaissance. - See plates LXVI-LXXI.

Luigi Coletti