NICCOLÒ. - Sculptor of the 12th century, who according to eighteenth-century Ferrarese literature is considered a native of Ficarolo in the Polesine. He displays a conception no longer rudely plastic and abstracted from narrative incidentals, but in part pictorial, with a reduction of hollows and projections, use of flattened reliefs, hints at definitions of setting, better compositional and dramatic articulation, subtlety of ornamental motifs, iconographic derivations from classical sculpture and calligraphic manners in the drapery folds, echoing the highlights of Byzantine pictorial art.
Around 1135 N. executed the decoration on the lower part of the facade of the cathedral of Ferrara, in which there emerge, in the main portal, the very lively episode of the lunette (St. George Killing the Dragon), the eight bas-reliefs of the architrave, with scenes from the life of Christ, and several ornamental friezes and allegorical and realistic satirical panels, in the splay. To a later period belong the decorations of the portals in the Cathedral and in the church of S. Zeno, at Verona, where the master's pictorialism is accentuated. In the first of these the lunette with the Adoration of the Magi is notable; in the second, besides the lunette depicting St. Zeno Blessing the Armed People of Verona, one admires the representations of human labors, of sin, of the months and of animals, which are counterposed, to the left of the portal, by the reliefs inspired by the life of Jesus and due to a certain Guglielmo, not further identifiable, who was a pupil of N., with evident narrative gifts, but somewhat inferior to the master. The art of N. had continuators in the cathedrals of Piacenza and Cremona, in the sagra of S. Michele, near Susa, and even at Chamalières in France.
Bibliography7 works
Alberto Neppi