 |
 |
 |
Selvatico (1847) p.68 discusses the Lombard style. The context is a discussion of the capitals of the apse of the church of Santa Sofia in Padua. He had argued for a date ‘anteriore al nono secolo’ for them in his 1842 Guida di Padova, page 246. He wished to argue that they were of the same date and workmanship as the bas-reliefs of Cividale in the so-called ‘Tempietto Longobardo’, and ‘come pajano lavorati nella stessa officina dei bassorilievi cividalesi’. The works at Cividale for Selvatico is the type of the new style - ‘questo nuovo barabaro stile di cui ë compiuto tipo il monumento cividalese’.
Selvatico goes on to argue that when works accepted without dispute as having been made in the 11th Century are examined, it will be clear how far the art of bas-relief had developed. The incompetence, seen in works with ‘sgarbati e scorretti solchi’ and without any roundness, has almost completely disappeared. By ‘solchi’ he seems to mean the furrows made by a plough, lines which Ruskin sees as characteristic of ‘Proutism’ or ‘Proutishness’.
Memories had remained of the Roman traditions of Aquileia and Altino, and that had enhanced the reputation of their builders. Both had, he suggests, considerable trade with Byzantium and the Orient, and that had influenced the monuments of those cities. The result, Selvatico suggests, was what he thought of as the bizarre mixture which German and French architectural historians have called ‘romanzo’; presumably ‘Romanesque’ is the appropriate translation of that word.
|
|
|
[Version 0.05: May 2008]