Renaissance in Italy, Volume 3 (of 7): The Fine ArtsSymonds, John Addington
History
Renaissance in Italy, Volume 3 (of 7): The Fine Arts
Symonds, John Addington
Art, Italian
Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must
now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried
the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of
Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under
the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the façade
of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he
bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the
style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity
and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence
of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be
found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner
of Ghiberti.[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control
exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and
treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic
qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if
Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism
of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque
delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the
sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to
a true sense of their aesthetical vocation, illuminating with its
brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the
stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been
subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands
of Andrea.
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