The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a Great Masonic GuildScott, Leader
History
The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a Great Masonic Guild
Scott, Leader
Cathedrals; Church architecture; Guilds
The thirteenth century was a time of immense development in art; what
Niccolò and Giovanni di Pisa did for sculpture, Jacopo Tedesco and
Arnolfo did for architecture. Jacopo was the first to introduce the
pointed arch into Central Italy, at Assisi; Arnolfo further developed
it in his cathedral at Florence, where the arches of the nave are
round, and the windows pointed. After this era we have no more
Romanesque--the reign of Italian Gothic has begun.
The Basilican form, too, has vanished; we have now the nave and
transepts of the Latin cross. No longer the small double-arched
window, but long pointed arches filled with beautiful tracery. The old
symbolic animals linger on, but in the subordinate form of grotesques
in ornamentation.
That distinctive mark of the guild, the lion of Judah, takes a new
position in the Italian Gothic. It is no longer between the pillar and
the arch, but beneath the column, as Niccolò and Guido da Como first
placed it in their pulpits. You see it under the pillars of the north
door of the Florentine Duomo, where the transition into Renaissance
is indicated by a particularly classic figure of a child standing by
the lion; and under the central column of the windows of the Spanish
chapel in the cloister of S. Maria Novella, where it serves to mark
the fact that the architects Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro (who in the
documents of the time are styled Magister Fra Sisto and Magister Fra
Ristoro) were members of the Masonic Guild.
Jacopo, the inaugurator of Italian Gothic, spent all his later years
in Florence, having left Colle many years before, when he had finished
the castle there. Jacopo's work in Florence consisted of the building
of the Bargello, which is a perfect specimen of the late Comacine
style, built in _modo gallico_ with large smoothly-hewn stones. The
connection of the Masters of the guild with the south of Italy is
shown here as well as at Pisa, for it is said that King Manfred
commissioned Jacopo Tedesco to design the sepulchre of the Emperor
Frederic in the abbey church of Monreale in Sicily. (Manfred died in
1266.)
Jacopo also introduced a reform into Florence. In the time when Messer
Rubaconte of Como was Podestà of Florence (1236, 1237), his
compatriot, Jacopo Tedesco of Campione, near Como, proposed to him
that the streets should be paved with stones instead of bricks, to
which Messer Rubaconte agreed, and the same method of paving still
continues in Florence.
The second Lapo, Arnolfo's fellow-pupil, and perhaps brother, was the
author of several buildings in the end of the thirteenth century,
which Vasari falsely attributes to Jacopo the elder. He also continued
Jacopo Tedesco's fortifications at Colle.[243]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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