John Ruskin - Val d'Arno

20. Secondly, take what value there is in the tradition that this sarcophagus was made the tomb of the mother of the

{Illustration: PLATE I:—THE PISAN LATONA. Angle of Panel of the Adoration, in Niccola's Pulpit.}

Countess Matilda. If you look to the fourteenth chapter of the third volume of "Modern Painters," you will find the mythic character of the Countess Matilda, as Dante employed it explained at some length. She is the representative of Natural Science as opposed to Theological.

21. Chance coincidences merely, these; but full of teaching for us, looking back upon the past. To Niccola, the piece of marble was, primarily, and perhaps exclusively, an example of free chiselling, and humanity of treatment. What else it was to him,—what the spirits of Atalanta and Matilda could bestow on him, depended on what he was himself. Of which Vasari tells you nothing. Not whether he was gentleman or clown—rich or poor—soldier or sailor. Was he never, then, in those fleets that brought the marbles back from the ravaged Isles of Greece? was he at first only a labourer's boy among the scaffoldings of the Pisan apse,—his apron loaded with dust—and no man praising him for his speech? Rough he was, assuredly; probably poor; fierce and energetic, beyond even the strain of Pisa,—just and kind, beyond the custom of his age, knowing the Judgment and Love of God: and a workman, with all his soul and strength, all his days.

22. You hear the fame of him as of a sculptor only. It is right that you should; for every great architect must be a sculptor, and be renowned, as such, more than by his building. But Niccola Pisano had even more influence on Italy as a builder than as a carver.

For Italy, at this moment, wanted builders more than carvers; and a change was passing through her life, of which external edifice was a necessary sign. I complained of you just now that you never looked at the Byzantine font in the temple of St. John. The sacristan generally will not let you. He takes you to a particular spot on the floor, and sings a musical chord. The chord returns in prolonged echo from the chapel roof, as if the building were all one sonorous marble bell.

Which indeed it is; and travellers are always greatly amused at being allowed to ring this bell; but it never occurs to them to ask how it came to be ringable:—how that tintinnabulate roof differs from the dome of the Pantheon, expands into the dome of Florence, or declines into the whispering gallery of St. Paul's.

23. When you have had full satisfaction of the tintinnabulate roof, you are led by the sacristan and Murray to Niccola Pisano's pulpit; which, if you have spare time to examine it, you find to have six sides, to be decorated with tablets of sculpture, like the sides of the sarcophagus, and to be sustained on seven pillars, three of which are themselves carried on the backs of as many animals.

All this arrangement had been contrived before Niccola's time, and executed again and again. But behold! between the capitals of the pillars and the sculptured tablets there are interposed five cusped arches, the hollow beneath the pulpit showing dark through their foils. You have seen such cusped arches before, you think?

Yes, gentlemen, you have; but the Pisans had not . And that intermediate layer of the pulpit means—the change, in a word, for all Europe, from the Parthenon to Amiens Cathedral. For Italy it means the rise of her Gothic dynasty; it means the duomo of Milan instead of the temple of Paestum.

24. I say the duomo of Milan, only to put the change well before your eyes, because you all know that building so well. The duomo of Milan is of entirely bad and barbarous Gothic, but the passion of pinnacle and fret is in it, visibly to you, more than in other buildings. It will therefore serve to show best what fulness of change this pulpit of Niccola Pisano signifies.

In it there is no passion of pinnacle nor of fret. You see the edges of it, instead of being bossed, or knopped, or crocketed, are mouldings of severest line. No vaulting, no clustered shafts, no traceries, no fantasies, no perpendicular flights of aspiration. Steady pillars, each of one polished block; useful capitals, one trefoiled arch between them; your panel above it; thereon your story of the founder of Christianity. The whole standing upon beasts, they being indeed the foundation of us, (which Niccola knew far better than Mr. Darwin); Eagle to carry your Gospel message—Dove you think it ought to be?

{Illustration: PLATE II.—NICCOLA PISANO'S PULPIT.}

Eagle, says Niccola, and not as symbol of St. John Evangelist only, but behold! with prey between its claws. For the Gospel, it is Niccola's opinion, is not altogether a message that you may do whatever you like, and go straight to heaven. Finally, a slab of marble, cut hollow a little to bear your book; space enough for you to speak from at ease,—and here is your first architecture of Gothic Christianity!

25. Indignant thunder of dissent from German doctors,—clamour from French savants. 'What! and our Treves, and our Strasburg, and our Poictiers, and our Chartres! And you call this thing the first architecture of Christianity!' Yes, my French and German friends, very fine the buildings you have mentioned are; and I am bold to say I love them far better than you do, for you will run a railroad through any of them any day that you can turn a penny by it. I thank you also, Germans, in the name of our Lady of Strasburg, for your bullets and fire; and I thank you, Frenchmen, in the name of our Lady of Rouen, for your new haberdashers' shops in the Gothic town;—meanwhile have patience with me a little, and let me go on.

26. No passion of fretwork, or pinnacle whatever, I said, is in this Pisan pulpit. The trefoiled arch itself, pleasant as it is, seems forced a little; out of perfect harmony with the rest (see Plate II.). Unnatural, perhaps, to Niccola?

Altogether unnatural to him, it is; such a thing never would have come into his head, unless some one had shown it him. Once got into his head, he puts it to good use; perhaps even he will let this somebody else put pinnacles and crockets into his head, or at least, into his son's, in a little while. Pinnacles,—crockets,—it may be, even traceries. The ground-tier of the baptistery is round-arched, and has no pinnacles; but look at its first story. The clerestory of the Duomo of Pisa has no traceries, but look at the cloister of its Campo Santo.

27. I pause at the words;—for they introduce a new group of thoughts, which presently we must trace farther.

The Holy Field;—field of burial. The "cave of Machpelah which is before Mamre," of the Pisans. "There they buried Abraham, and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah."

How do you think such a field becomes holy,—how separated, as the resting-place of loving kindred, from that other field of blood, bought to bury strangers in?

When you have finally succeeded, by your gospel of mammon, in making all the men of your own nation not only strangers to each other, but enemies; and when your every churchyard becomes therefore a field of the stranger, the kneeling hamlet will vainly drink the chalice of God in the midst of them. The field will be unholy. No cloisters of noble history can ever be built round such an one.

28. But the very earth of this at Pisa was holy, as you know. That "armata" of the Tuscan city brought home not only marble and ivory, for treasure; but earth,—a fleet's burden,—from the place where there was healing of soul's leprosy: and their field became a place of holy tombs, prepared for its office with earth from the land made holy by one tomb; which all the knighthood of Christendom had been pouring out its life to win.

29. I told you just now that this sculpture of Niccola's was the beginning of Christian architecture. How do you judge that Christian architecture in the deepest meaning of it to differ from all other?