This beautifully written and broad-ranging book examines Italian late medieval sculpture in its political and social context. It considers sculpture as a public and institutional gesture, from the Holy Roman Empire and the Angevins in the Kingdom of Sicily to the central and north Italian communes and signorie. Its subject ranges from public programs, such as the gate of Capua and other public monuments, to the tombs of dignitaries, saints, and rulers. In order to understand sculpture as a political gesture Cassidy makes use of fresco cycles, sermons, poetry, and various types of communal and papal legislation. Although the social and political role of sculpture might seem an obvious topic, this fundamental aspect of Italian Gothic sculpture has rarely been discussed beyond the context of individual monuments within particular cities (for example, Max Seidel and Peter Anselm Riedl for Siena in Kie kirchen von Siena, Munich: Bruckmann, 1985, 3 vols.). Cassidy’s synthesis is the kind of book we have needed for a long, long time.

Studies of Italian sculpture traditionally focus on style, date, and attribution, and are often restricted to a defined geographical area or city. This intellectual tradition has created, of course, the foundation of the field, but it has also constricted the discourse. It is one of the great merits of Cassidy’s book that he considers the entire peninsula at the same time that he gives care and attention to the specifics of certain commissions and particular projects. What this approach permits is a sense of the interactions and exchanges between historical moments and places, because artists were constantly observing each other. The tomb of Robert of Anjou in Naples, for example, needs to be understood in relation to the tomb of Henry VII in Pisa.

Frederick II jump-started the political role of sculpture in the 1230s by using it as an ideological tool in the gateway of Capua, a gesture of great rhetorical power. This was probably one of the first monuments since antiquity to affirm the authority and independence of the state, and may in part have been inspired by the bitter conflict with the papacy over the nature of the emperor’s rule in his Italian domains. The decoration of the Capuan gate resurrects imperial Roman models to express with particular, and almost urgent, pungency concepts of rulership and justice. We can consider this echo of pre-Christian Roman models as a visual gesture analogous to the rhetoric of the great jurist Piero della Vigna who in his encyclical appeal to the rulers of Europe, written in 1239, evoked another type of authorization for the emperor: that Frederick II, not the pope, was Christ’s vicar on earth. With the emperor, then, both monumental sculpture and texts (letters, edicts, proclamations, the Constitutions of Melfi, etc.) were political and ideological instruments. In the great struggle against the papacy, these rhetorical gestures “barged in the door” and made visible and public what might have remained a family squabble. The deliberate and conscious use of various types of media (but for our purposes, especially sculpture) gave them a new political valence embedded in ideological struggles for authority and identity.

From this context, the use of sculpture as a public gesture spread in many permutations to sites in the rest of Italy, and particularly to the communes of the north, which needed to express their independence and identity against the challenges presented by the papacy and empire, not to mention neighbors down the road. By developing symbols that evoked ancient foundation and protecting saints (often Early Christian bishop-martyrs), each city developed a repertoire of visual motifs that evoked in some measure a largely mythological history of place, from Romulus and Remus in Siena to the Lion of St. Mark in Venice. There developed an economy of “double origins” rooted in both pre-Christian antiquity (Romnulus and Remus, Hercules, Antenor) and protectors embedded within the Christian theory of salvation. The symbols of many cities were therefore appropriately “bilingual,” exalting the classical past while at the same time evoking its profoundly Christian nature. Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit in Pisa Cathedral does just this by placing images of Hercules and a personification of the crowned nursing figure of Pisa (doubling as Charity) as supports for the purely Christian reliefs in the upper part of the pulpit. Overlapping and complex layers of meaning parallel an equal overlapping of function, because pulpits were not only the locus of preaching the Christian word but also the sites in which important civic rituals took place. The classical and Christian worlds were woven together in a unity of image and action.

Monuments produced by the communes transformed the iconography of medieval sculpture by asserting the civic virtues of the well-run city and contado such as charity, justice, and fortitude. At the same time, the new social and economic status of the middle class as the bedrock of twelfth- and thirteenth-century prosperity is reflected in new types of decorative motifs (the trades represented in the central portal of San Marco in Venice). Merchants and pious commoners came to take a conspicuous place in the decoration of churches, such as Sant’Omobono at Cremona. With the construction of cathedrals frequently taken over by communal governments, it is no wonder that new types of imagery began to emerge that reflected the secular values of laymen and the city-state along with those of the church and the saints. Sculpture thus acquired a public and outdoor job to do that was no longer exclusively in the service of the church. Yet strangely enough, little has been written until now on how the experiments in and factions of civic, monarchical, imperial, and signorial governments (popolo, nobility, Guelphs, Ghibellines, for example) played out in the realm of the visual arts and inflected the choice of subject, materials, location, and character of Italian medieval sculpture.

This book is immensely ambitious, and reconstructing social and political context is fraught with dangers, since circumstances might fluctuate from year to year depending on internal and external events. Yet the broad scope of Cassidy’s enterprise is nonetheless precisely its great virtue. Specialists who work on one site or another will no doubt quibble about interpretations and analyses, and each section of this volume can be enriched by the observations of local scholars (for Naples, for example, we’ve known for some time that the tomb of Catherine of Austria is a pastiche, redesigned for its present location because of major changes to the building). The broad cast of the topic permits Cassidy to develop certain themes, relationships, and connections; and in a world where everybody was watching everybody else, the importance of the sculptural gesture cannot be overlooked.

With this in mind, we may wish to consider whether the monuments produced by the Angevin court and the papacy were not intended as a foil to the expression of autonomous civic values expressed by the communes. Surely the tombs of the papal curia and those of Naples, for both of which the effigy was reserved and which utilized precious materials (marble from Roman ruins) and monumental compositions, affirm lineage and authority. The effigy on the raised tomb is a particularly French phenomenon, and thus in Italy must have been redolent of autocratic power. In Naples the sculptor who originated this type of tomb, Tino di Camaino, received his training in the workshop of Nicolo in Pisa and Siena where he would have become familiar with the civic as well as with the religious themes of monumental sculpture. In the long run, Tino’s strongly Guelph sympathies could not be reconciled with those of Ghibelline Siena and Pisa, so he moved to Naples, the center of Guelphdom, where he proceeded to use his remarkable talents to change the course of tomb sculpture. The formula developed by Tino eventually moved back north in the 1364 tomb of Niccolò Acciaioli in the Certosa del Galluzzo in Florence, which brought to Florence its first lay effigy as a variation of the grandiose Neapolitan compositions. Things had gone full circle, and the allure of the ostentatious noble tomb was irresistible to the increasingly hierarchical élites of the north at the end of the communal age.

Exchanges worked both ways: in the communes, families adopted for their tomb memorials the heraldic motifs; it is ironic to think that coats of arms and shields, the symbols of aristocracy, came to decorate the tombs of manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. These are ubiquitous in churches that preserve their medieval decoration, and once covered pavements and lined the walls (see the coats of arms on the exterior walls of Sta. Croce in Florence).

One of this book’s many strengths is Cassidy’s recognition that there were other types of three-dimensional monuments aside from those made of marble, especially stucco, which was used in many contexts, including noble and royal projects. This material rarely survives, though marvelous examples are still partially intact in the crypt of the cathedral of Scala and in the Museo Diocesano di San Pietro at Teggiano in Campania; it might have been worthwhile to have included a few examples.

Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in Italy, c. 1240–1400 is an essential contribution to our developing knowledge of Italian medieval art, and forms part of a broader pattern of studies on the Italian city, such as Philip Jones’s The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which are enriching our understanding of the civic life and institutions of the communes.