NICCOLÒ. — Sculptor of the 12th century, whom eighteenth-century Ferrarese literature considered a native of Ficarolo in the Polesine. He displays a conception that is no longer crudely plastic and abstracted from narrative contingencies, but partly pictorial, with a reduction of recesses and projections, the use of flattened reliefs, hints at the definition of setting, better compositional and dramatic articulation, subtlety of ornamental motifs, iconographic derivations from classical sculpture, and calligraphic treatment of the folds, echoing the highlights of Byzantine pictorial art.
Around 1135 N. executed the decoration on the lower part of the façade of Ferrara Cathedral, in which the very lively episode of the lunette (S. Giorgio che uccide il drago), the eight bas-reliefs of the architrave, with scenes from the life of Christ, and several ornamental friezes and allegorical and realistically satirical panels in the splay of the portal are particularly notable. A later period saw the decoration of the portals of the Cathedral and of the church of S. Zeno in Verona, where the master’s pictorialism becomes more pronounced. In the former, the lunette with the Adorazione dei Magi is noteworthy; in the latter, in addition to the lunette depicting S. Zeno che benedice il popolo veronese in armi, one may admire representations of human labors, sin, the months, and animals, which are counterbalanced, to the left of the portal, by reliefs inspired by the life of Jesus and attributed to a certain Guglielmo, otherwise unidentifiable, who was a pupil of N. He possessed evident narrative gifts, but was somewhat inferior to his master. N.’s art found continuators in the cathedrals of Piacenza and Cremona, in the sagra of S. Michele near Susa, and even at Chamalières in France.
XXV, p. 449; A. Boeckler, Die Bronzetür von Verona, Marburgo 1931, p. 54 ff.; G. Giovannoni and others, La cattedrale di Ferrara, Ferrara 1935, pp. 170–79 and passim. Alberto Neppi