Italian Gothic Sculpture: c. 1250-c. 1400. (Reviews).

Anita Fiderer Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture: c. 1250-c. 1400

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxvi + 401 pp. $95. ISBN: 0-521-44483-7.

As one peruses the breadth and depth of Professor Anita Moskowitz's new volume one cannot help but feel a sense of vicarious satisfaction. For it is clearly the result of decades of close study and observation in the field of late medieval Italian sculpture (her two previous books being firstly, on Andrea and Nino Pisano and, secondly, on the Arca di San Domenico in Bologna). Students and scholars ever since 1955 have been indebted to John Pope-Hennessy's solid and perceptive Italian Gothic Sculpture, once reviewed by Charles Mitchell "as a remarkable achievement of organization in a scraggly and difficult field".

In this new book there are 325 pages of text, interspersed with 395 illustrations, which the author regards as no more than a selection of examples. These take us up and down the Italian peninsula, well beyond the familiar centers in Tuscany. A brief introduction comments on the native Romanesque masters Wiligelmo and Antelami, setting the stage for what she regards as the "fundamental classicism of the Italian tradition, or rather traditions" (19). In her view, as well as for many other scholars, the gradual engrafting of the northern Gothic begins with Nicola Pisano (26), is largely furthered by his son and students in Tuscany and is carried as far as Padua, Milan, and Naples by yet other major Tuscans like Giovanni di Balduccio and Tino di Camaino. The full elegance of mid-thirteenth-century Parisian Gothic is not achieved, however, until later in the Trecento by the likes of Nino Pisano.

Professor Moskowitz decided not to take her account beyond 1400 and thus largely omits discussion (Milan excepted) of the International Gothic that is more fully visible in Pope-Hennessy's much shorter volume. Additionally, she prefers to think of the period as circumscribed and does not comment on any of her examples as forerunners of Quattrocento art. Within her chosen chronological limits we find the older Italian tradition for decorated pulpits, tombs, standing Madonnas, and other liturgical furnishings, large and small, carefully considered whether splendid or provincial in quality.

As to coherent facade designs, which are so often associated with the great northern Gothic cathedrals, only those of Siena and Orvieto contain wonderful contemporary assemblages. Professor Moskowitz deals with these quite satisfactorily, albeit a bit too briefly. In reviewing the sadly unfinished Duomo complex in Florence, she follows Marvin Trachtenberg and others in seeing the Campanile reliefs as completing a sort of scholastic program reminiscent of the plan found at such a tightly unified French example as Amiens. More broadly, however, the author is skeptical of dependence on "northern Gothic values" (336, n. 17). A humanizing tendency manifests itself rather early. She finds some parallels in contemporary Italian painting here and there, especially in comparison with relief work.

The book is, in fact, primarily concerned with stylistic innovation and secondarily with iconography, patronage (where the material is sometimes elementary or peripheral) and reconstruction of certain ensembles that had once been dismantled. Professor Moskowitz also is concerned about whether various sculptors took into account the worshipper's point of view but doesn't carry this to quite the same extreme as can be found in Marvin Trachtenberg's Dominion of the Eye (Cambridge, 1997, 185-95) or in Francis Ames-Lewis' Tuscan Marble Carving 1250-1350 (Aldershot, 1997). In the latter book the reader is treated to a large number of sharply angled and often dimly-lit photos which seemingly ignore the fact that a typical spectator has both binocular and light-adjusting vision. For some, this recent approach may run counter to the older notion that the medieval artist worked primarily for the glory of God. Even though one can easily find among certain Trecento sculptors and painters evidence of a growing interest in engaging the spectator with the depicted subject, a preponderance of art of the period was presented in a self-contained "ideal" world.

In general, Professor Moskowitz's photos are drawn from the Alinari archives, sometimes showing examples in their uncleaned condition. A few were taken by her or recent photographers, such as the excellent specialist Aurelio Amendola. The printing of these, though usually clear, has a uniform dullness that is unlikely to appeal to any but the dedicated scholar. For exciting and often more rewarding illustrations of this art one would do better to open the beautiful pages of Joachim Poeschke's Die Skulptur des Mittelalters in Italien, Band 2 (Munich, 2000), which contains some brilliant photos by A. Hirmer in duotone, some of them being in color. In none of these books will one find fully satisfying coverage of the greatest virtuoso practitioner of the age, Giovanni Pisano -- once correctly singled our for the highest praise by the English sculptor Henry Moore.

Professor Moskowitz's ambitious volume contains well thought out discussions of a great many examples. It is bound to become a useful reference work for scholars in the field with its very thorough and interesting endnotes. Intended in part for students (xxi), this reviewer would have preferred a lengthier introduction that would have explained at the beginning more of the special terminology and background of this "scraggly field." On the other hand, we can only applaud the author's sterling effort to bring out neglected areas of study and the sensible up-to-date evaluation of many of the best-known surviving examples.