VILIGELMO. — Sculptor of the 12th century, active in Modena. He may be regarded as the progenitor of Romanesque sculpture in Upper Italy and, in particular, of the Emilian school, which recent studies have now clearly distinguished from the Lombard school.
There is no documentary information, but his name is read on the inscription commemorating the foundation of the cathedral of Modena in 1099 (“inter scultores quanto sis dignus onore claret scultura nunc Wiligelme tua”). By comparison with the figures of the prophets Enoch and Elijah flanking the inscription, the four reliefs depicting scenes from Genesis, the friezes and figures of the Prophets on the jambs of the main portal, the two torch-bearing genii, and several capitals of the loggia may be attributed to him with complete certainty—that is, the greater part of the sculptures on the façade, which he must have executed between 1100 and 1106, or at the latest in 1110. The other sculptures on the exterior of the cathedral of Modena, those of the portal of the abbey of Nonantola, and also those of the former façade of the cathedral of Cremona, which are sometimes attributed to him, belong to various disciples and continuators, at times highly original and partly formed in a different tradition.
The art of V. has no precedents in Emilia or in the neighboring regions, nor can it be derived—as some maintain—from the Ottonian art of Lombardy, from which it differs profoundly in the courtly and “illustrious” character of its language. V. in fact expresses himself in a language of “vernacular” structure, which is called Romanesque, just as the dialects that at this time were rising throughout Western Europe to literary dignity are called “Romance.” Certain stylistic elements, such as the use of the “corded” fold, appear to be related to the sculpture of the first Aquitanian school, which only a few years earlier had produced its works with reliefs that were at first (S. Saturnino in Toulouse, 1096) clearly volumetric, and later (the cloister of
Moissac, completed in 1100) more articulated plastically. But this is not sufficient to prove a direct descent, and it was certainly far more decisive in V.’s formation to study provincial Roman sculpture on the stelae and sarcophagi of the Mutinensian necropolis.