CHAPTER XIII ON SOME EXAMPLES OF WOOD SCULPTURE OF THE TRECENTO AND QUATTROCENTO IN ITALY I T would be impossible to approach, without the greatest diffidence, the task of attempting to describe Italian art in wood within the limits of a few pages. The period to which we have to go for the best examples is one which is intimately connected with the revival of art in which Italy played so overwhelmingly prominent a part. Italian sculpture in wood has been hitherto little known and little studied, at any rate by English writers. There are certain museums, such as the Museo Civico of Pisa, where a fair amount of fine examples is to be found, but much is distributed in various cathedrals or hidden away in village churches where it has often suffered from neglect, from unskilful restorations, and from additions of tawdry drapery. It is but recently, in 1905, that a considerable number of interesting examples of the art of wood-carving in the Abruzzi were gathered together at a special exhibition. Contrary to a formerly received opinion (it may be noted that Molinier, in his Histoire de l'Art, treats the subject very summarily, and confines his attention almost entirely to tarsia work), the art has always been popular in Italy, and as elsewhere has followed on the lines of the more important sculptures in stone, marble, and bronze. The story of sculpture in Italy is evidence of a wide-reaching effect on the art of other countries from the dawn of the Renaissance to its full development in the days of Michael Angelo, but in the examples which will be selected we shall find ourselves in an atmosphere entirely different from that in which we have been living in the case of those of the period of Gothic art in France, in the Netherlands, and in other more northern countries of Europe. We shall be confronted at every step with the greatest names of the early Renaissance-indeed, it may be said, with all the great names-so that comparisons with their work as sculptors in other materials—in marble and stone, in terra cotta, bronze, and even in majolica, would be constantly arising. To embrace the subject with any completeness would imply an incursus into the whole history of Italian art of the period. It would involve such questions as the influences exercised by the study of antique models on the trecento schools, or, again, the measure of inspiration from French art to be accorded to those of the quattrocento. We might have to discuss the position of Gothic art in Italy, how far it was congenial to the character of the people, and what were its relations to the older systems in the work of Niccola, of Giovanni, and of Andrea Pisani, who added to it the poetical naturalism which laid the foundations of the great change which we know under the name of Renaissance. For, as in this book we are dealing almost exclusively with Gothic art, we must remember that the early Renaissance was but a development of Gothic feeling, passing by slow degrees into an appreciation of humanism and realism. Owing to the quantity of available matter and to the impossibility of treating in one chapter the whole subject of wood sculpture in Italy, it is necessary to make a selection, and to confine attention for the most part to certain figure work belonging to the trecento and quattrocento schools of Pisa, Florence, and Siena. f These are life-sized statues representing the Annunciation by means of detached figures of the Virgin Mary and the archangel Gabriel. In their general character they find no parallel elsewhere, and for poetic beauty and unaffected naturalism many of them are unsurpassed in the history of medieval carvings in any other countries. They may indeed claim to rank as great sculpture, and in addition combine the arts of sculptors and painters of the highest rank. Some [ few other examples of figure work of the same period will also be noted, and, for the rest, the crucifixes and Madonnas of Italian origin have already been included in the section devoted to that part of our subject. In earlier days and throughout the Carlovingian period, art in Italy remained steadfastly attached to Byzantine methods and traditions, and was always coy of the influence of the north and consequently of Gothic ideas. Wood sculpture was especially cultivated in the monasteries of the south of the peninsula and some ancient doors of the twelfth century, besides the well-known ones of Santa Sabina still exist: for example, those carved with scenes in the life of the Virgin of the church of Santa Maria in Cellis at Carsoli, the similar ones of San Pietro, Alba Fucense, and the panels with like scenes of Sta. Maria Maggiore at Alatri. In Romanesque times sculpture in wood had produced also in Tuscany one of its finest efforts— the 'Deposition' of the cathedral of Volterra, already noticed. The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses four interesting columns (No. 269, 1886) each about eight feet high, which may have been supports of a pulpit, or as the museum label suggests, for organs. The capitals are carved with foliage, amongst which are human and animal figures: rude work after decidedly oriental models, the surfaces of the wood flat, so that the carving is in the fashion of entaille or champlevé. They are described as south Italian work of the |