Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture (Paperback)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1882 Original Publisher: Scribner Subjects: Sculpture Sculptors Sculptors, Italian Sculpture, Italian Art / Individual Artist Art / Sculpture Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: HISTORICAL HANDBOOK ITALIAN SCULPTURE. CHAPTER I. NICCOLA PISANO. As we walk through the quiet streets of Pisa, or traverse the broad plain which divides her from the sea, we find it difficult to realise that in the eleventh century she was a crowded seaport, the busy mart of Oriental traffic, and chief among the Ghibelline cities of Italy. The antique sarcophagi in her Campo Santo, which then decorated the exterior of her newly built Cathedral and served for the next century and a half as tombs for illustrious Pisans and foreigners of distinction deceased at Pisa, recal to us a still earlier period of her history, when she was a Roman colony and famous for her marble works. To us they are of peculiar interest, not only as visible links between her ancient and mediaeval periods, but also because Niccola Pisano made the bas-reliefs upon them special objects of study, and learned from them those forgotten arts of composition, treatment of form, and disposition of drapery, which made his sculpture superior to any executed in Italy since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This was in the thirteenth century, when Italy was convulsed by the great struggle unceasingly carried on between the Imperial Such as some Pistm Archbishops; the Countess Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda, in 1187; Pope Gregory VIII., who died at Pisa in the name year, and the great Burgundian in 1193. See Appendix A. and Papal powers, which had so much influence upon the devel...