Chapter 12:
Displays of Antique Art in the Middle Ages




Introduction


Just as so much of European history is no more than the praise of Rome, so the ancients have an important place in the history of art collecting and display. Their temples were frequently proto-museums of antiquities, redolent with historical and, by extension, political kudos: thus Alexander took some suits of armour from the time of the Trojan War from the Temple of Athena at Troy (Arrian 1.11.7f.). Their approach could be uncritical: this is the case even with Pausanias, who supplies our fullest account of many sites of the Greek world. And Wace (1949, 24), notes that both the Casa Romuli and the Lapis Niger were taken at their face value, `and no efforts, so far as we know, were ever made to verify the truth of the legends about them by excavation or other archaeological methods'. But what was important to the Romans was veneration: we know that the Lapis was preserved, and the Casa Romuli re-thatched when necessary; and that families and associations considered it their duty to preseve some of the other monuments. And although, when the Romans plundered (as they did frequently in order to embellish religious or civil buildings), they clearly went for quality, even if this meant taking copies, they were also interested in pieces of sentimental or historical value.  

The Middle Ages could have learned about the Romans' propensity for taking artistic spolia not only from written sources, but also from the inscriptions displayed on bases of the stolen works (Waurick 1975), from surviving works of art, and also from representations of them on coins. Contact with Greece and especially Constantinople was frequent, and many mediaeval accounts survive describing the antiquities to be found there (Van der Vin 1980). Parallels between the ancient, mediaeval and Renaissance arrangement of sculptural displays are therefore to be expected, just as the re-use of antique motifs may be interpreted in a `political' manner - as prestigious recreations of antique grandeur, which is how Dubourg-Noves writes (1980, 338f.) of those church towers of France which he suggests are based on tholos tomb forms. It is also likely that, as Bozzo remarks for Genoa (1979, 57), antique material was displayed in private dwellings as a kind of `title of nobility' - and antique sites occupied for the same reason, as happened at Brescia (see above, p.00). The `public' parallel might be the use of the antique as stylistic inspiration for contemporary art (Moskowitz 1983, 61), to complement the display of actual antiquities.


Imports


We have already seen how the expansion of cities in the West threw up antiquities which were sometimes displayed. To these should be added works imported into Italy from the Greek islands and from Asia Minor, along with coins and other small antiquities - not surprisingly, by those cities which had trading contacts there. The scale of the traffic in `art-work' (as opposed to building materials) was probably always small, even though the Levant was well travelled by Westerners (Borsook 1973). The one exception was Venice, whose collecting of work from the East was a more organised affair, carried on with the blessing of the State and sometimes using warships for transport, not unlike Lord Elgin (Babelon 1901, 85ff.): the spolia included much Byzantine Christian material, which appears to have been used as patterns for `forging' similar works and making them look old (Demus 1955). Pisan war galleys also brought home `marble remains' including sarcophagi, according to Vasari (in his Life of Nicola Pisano), although the only evidence that they went further afield than Italy for them is the material from the Mahdia mosque in the Duomo.  

One important work which was probably brought from the East is the Colossus of Barletta, a bronze statue of an Emperor, recently suggested to be Honorius (Testini 1974): parts of its legs were taken for bell-metal to Siponto in 1309, but the remainder (restored nobody knows when) appear to have reached the present location by 1442, perhaps being erected as early as the fourteenth century (ibid., 313). The statue may have come from Constantinople - in which case it may have been on the way to Venice as booty after the sack of 1204, for associated legends speak of a shipwreck (Gazda 1970, 248). However, the work is substantially undamaged and, if it was Venetian booty, we lack any explanation of why the Venetians should abandon such an imposing prize; and it cannot have been taken simply for its metal value because, had this been the case, it would certainly have been melted down prior to transport. Perhaps, on the other hand, it stood somewhere in Puglia from antique times. As for the bronze ram in the manner of Lysippus, now in Palermo, and one of a pair which once decorated the outside of the Castello Maniace at Syracuse, its origin is unknown: did Frederick II find the pair while digging Augusta, or even for the actual Castle foundations (c. 1239), or were they imported?  

The spolia of S. Mark's Venice, and the imitative nature of venetian antiquarianism. suggest that other antiquities were imported into the West in the Middle Ages; but the best example, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, is somewhat later. The Mausoleum was monument visible throughout the Middle Ages, and its reliefs were prized by some, for pieces found their way to the West. The structure itself was dismantled by the Knights of S. John to help build the Castle of S. Peter: this was done in two stages, first in 1404, then again in 1523, so that `a very considerable amount of the masonry of the castle was made up of stones from the Mausoleum' (Jeppesen 1958, 16ff.). Furthermore, if we accept the well known account of the Commandant de la Tourette (who was in charge of the 1522 repairs), the tomb chamber was actually discovered leading from a room containing much marble decoration and bas-reliefs. It went the way of the rest: `having at first admired these works, and entertained their fancy with the singularity of the sculpture, they pulled it to pieces, and broke up the whole of it' (ibid., 12f.). The account makes it clear that the sappers were digging downwards for stone - not dismantling any superstructure; and, indeed, the characteristic grey-green stone of the foundation blocks also appears in the 1404 building, in all to a calculated 6,000 cubic metres.  

Because much of the sculptural decoration from the Mausoleum also appeared in the castle walls, it is possible that the tomb stood almost complete before the first castle was begun. The Knights themselves probably liked the sculptured pieces of the tomb, for some of them were placed prominently in the walls of their castle - just as discovered antiquities were exhibited on city walls back home in Europe. They probably took others abroad with them. Thus the fragment no. 1023 now in the British Museum was found in a Turkish house on Rhodes, only a few hours sailing away, and possibly taken there before the Turkish conquest of 1522; Gualandi believes that it was cut for easy transport, carefully leaving intact the figure of an Amazon which it displays (1979, cat. 3). Another piece, fragment 1022, reached Genoa, perhaps in the same manner. Sufficient sculptures remained visible later in the century to prompt the enterprising project of Fra' Sabba da Castiglione to take the whole tomb to Italy, to beautify Mantua; unfortunately, the Turks got in the way (1505-7: cf. Gualandi 1979, 42, n. 2). Sabba, incidentally, appears to have acted as the Cyriacus of his generation, importing `two little heads of Amazons' into Italy, and sending to Isabella d'Este sculptures from Kos, Naxos and Delos (Gualandi 1979, 19, and n. 3). One thing which is certain is that knowledge of the Mausoleum, and the very tradition of its site (which was quite well known in the Middle Ages) disappeared when the Knights evacuated the area (Hasluck 1911-12).



The political purpose of antiquities

  Aesthetic appreciation was an element in the display of art in Roman times, but political propaganda values were frequently stronger - indeed, perhaps art is always propaganda of some kind. When, therefore, antique works of art were brought together during the Middle Ages, they were likewise not intended to be `neutral' in the modern museum sense, but rather to serve some practical end, often political; thus Hodges (1983, ch. 8), sees many parallels for Charlemagne's `conspicuous spending on monuments to reinforce a vulnerable political system', and suggests that such spending declined in the 820s because of a decline in long-distance trade. Even the most `foreign' of adopted objects might have an almost parental love lavished upon them - as when a late fifteenth century Italian visitor to Constantinople could not examine the antique monuments closely because the Turks were jealous of them (Borsook 1973, 160).  Again, for Kitzinger (1982, 672), Nicetas Choniates' On the Statues, written in response to the sack of 1204, exemplified the Byzantines' `need to assert their Greek identity and reattach themselves to their ancient roots in the face of external threats' - just as the rationale behind the revival of antique forms could be traced to Emperors such as Theodosius I, Michael VIII or Heraclius, who were all `anxious to link their rule to an ancient and revered past' (ibid., 672ff.).  

Although we often do not know enough about the circumstances in which antiquities were assembled to be certain about the motives, we can at least be sure that the larger objects were displayed: perhaps Charlemagne's bronzes at Aix may be considered trophies because, although they are certainly contemporary, they must have been modelled directly after the antique: the wolf (for its connections with Romulus: it is really a remodelled bear); the pine-cone; the eagle; the doors of the Chapel; the bronze railings inside it. Braunfels, in a fine article (1965), provides parallels for most of these; his illustration of a Roman bronze door from Mainz (now in Wiesbaden, Städtisches Museum: ibid., Abb. 27) surely underlines just how available similar material must have been over a thousand years ago. Nor is the political message of such a collection difficult to understand (Beutler 1982, 76-127), given its manifest connections with ancient Rome. But even if Rome was the frame of reference for most antiquities (from descriptions or visits), a constant exemplar for the beautification of Italian cities must have been Constantinople, whence the Pisan community in 1160 deeded some income, by a decision of the Consuls, to the endowment of the Duomo back home (Müller 1879, documents dated 1141, 1160 and 1166).  

An early display of antique sculptures which illustrates their prestige value was that of Justinian, who is said to have built a `court' on the Sea of Marmara, outside the city of Constantinople, and decorated it with `great numbers of statues, some of bronze, some of polished stone, a sight worthy of a long description. One might surmise that they were the work of Pheidias the Athenian, or of the Sicyonian Lysippus or of Praxiteles' (Procopius Buildings 1.xi.7). In so doing, of course, the Emperor was following his predecessors in the West, who had imported original Greek statues or modern copies to grace their public and private areas. In Athens, the builders of the fifth-century `University' on the Agora re-erected the great tritons from the Concert Hall of Agrippa - although they did not have far to move them (Frantz 1975, 34). In the East, the Emperor had priestly functions; in the West, the works once at the Lateran and those later to form the basis of the Capitoline collections help underline the status of its owner, the Pope, as the inheritor of that Imperial power which the very objects exuded. Although papal use of the trappings of Imperial power dates from no earlier than the eleventh century (Krautheimer 1980, 192-4), it occurs much earlier in civic contexts, such as the display of funerary stelai in the Longobard walls of Benevento, where the use of antique funerary sculptures set in the fourteenth-century castle may help underline continuity (Rotili 1979, 38f.). The accounts of chroniclers (like those which underlined the continuity of the new Capua with the old: Cilento 1979, 15) support the thesis that such display was indeed political. Further confirmation of this view is provided if we agree with Werckmeister (1976, 540), that the designer of the Bayeux Tapestry was inspired by Trajan's Column `in order to gather the basic concept of the continuous political narrative as well as the scenic typology of the methodically planned victorious campaign'. Different in kind, but equally strong, is the antique frame of reference maintained in literature - such as the explicit parallel between Roman and Pisan conquest in the epic describing the Pisan Mahdia Campaign of 1087, or the Pisan theft from Amalfi in 1137 of a manuscript of the Pandects of Justinian (Repetti 1841, 4.320f.; Camera 1876/81, 330ff.). Classical echoes need not be visual, but rather parallel the collecting of objects, such as the sarcophagi now in the Campo Santo (Settis 1984, 9ff.).  

One important (and very Roman) way of acquiring antiquities and more recent art objects was therefore war-booty, such as Robert the Guiscard's sacking of Bari in 1073. The Chronicon Romualdi Salernitani says he `caused to be taken iron gates and marble columns, several with capitals, to Troia, on account of his victory' (RIS 7.1.188: the Chronicle erroneously says the material came from Palermo, which was then the seat of the Emirate of Sicily). Similarly, the antique bronze equestrian statue of the Regisole may have found its way from Ravenna to Pavia as booty of the Longobards; Opicinis de Canistris refers to the statue as having been `gilded of late' - surely an index of the high esteem in which it was held as a trophy (Bovini 1963, 141f.). In the same category would be the chains of the port of Pisa, hung by the Florentines in 1362 from the Baptistery `pro magnificentia civitatis' (Bruni 1925, 201); the great beasts of Perugia, displayed for the same reason, and discussed below - they also had enemy chains hung from their feet; and the head of Ares in Pisa, supposedly taken in battle from Genoa in 1282 (Settis 1984, No. 75). The Saracens frequently reciprocated by carrying off what their Christian enemies prized most highly - hence the altar-tables inserted in the walls of a mosque in Damascus, although these were certainly not antique: Barb 1956, 44).  

There are also some instances where standing monuments were protected from depredation for motives of civic pride. One such is the Roman senators' decree of 1162, already noted, protecting the Column of Trajan (De Bouard 1911, 241; Cavallaro 1984, 73f.), and another the Roman people's expulsion of monks from the Colosseum, when they tried to take it over during the pontificate of Eugenius IV (Rodocanachi 1913, 173). The Roman municipal statutes of 1363 have a section De antiquis aedificiis non diruendis, perhaps particularly necessary in a city where power was divided between the municipality and the papacy (cf. Rodocanachi 1913, passim). Control was not effective, and Schiaparelli points out (1902, 18) that there is no indication in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century statutes of the Magistri Aedificiorum Urbis that they had official care of any of the city's antique buildings. In more stable cities, consciousness of the past as reflected in monuments was a factor in local pride - as when a clear distinction is made in Campania between Salerno, refounded by Arechi, and Naples, where the citizens knew of the true antiquity of their city (Delogu 1979, 56); or when the Modenese in 1353 found a sarcophagus which they believed to be that of that ancient fighter against tyranny, M. Junius Brutus (Rebecchi 1984, 332, 345). .  

Of course, what is considered art display depends on the point of view adopted. Thus, for Poleggi (1973, ch. 5), the collection of antique pieces in the church of S. Maria di Castello at Genoa makes it no less than a mediaeval `antiquarium'. And when we add to such antiquities the prominence given to two Cufic inscriptions on two columns of the nave (ibid., 101f.), probably taken from a mosque, we may parallel  such works with the trophies displayed in Venice, especially the bronze horses from the Hippodrome, and the Tetrarchs, which may have come from the site of the palace of Romanus Lecapenus (Goodwin 1977, 18); for just as the Venetians thereby proclaimed their control over the East and its treasures, so the Genoese could remind themselves of their victories on the coast of North Africa, in a running war for control of the sea.  

When did the collecting of antiquities relinquish political for artistic significance? Miglio's comments (1982, 179) on Sixtus' restitution of statues to the Roman people offer a clue: he suggests that 1471, the date of the gift, is the first milestone in the transformation of the hill from the supreme political centre of the city into `a scenic and erudite museum of Rome'. The hill lost its market in 1477 to Piazza Navona, and it was henceforth used to display curiosities - not simply the colossal statue fragments from 1486, but also the marvellously preserved body of Aurelia the previous year. The gloss might be that antiquities separated from the seat of power become simply art-objects.


Trophies and museums


Occasionally the Middle Ages incorporated sculptures and inscriptions (sometimes as trophies of war after the Roman fashion: Waurick 1975, 40ff.) into later structures so that they are displayed for admiration, and convey a message. The earliest location was, as we have seen, city walls and gates - one thinks immediately of the (Eastern) lion at Pisa, or the walls of Lucca (i.e. the second circle), admired by Cyriacus of Ancona when he visited the city in 1442, including the marble lion on top of one of the gates (Repetti 1833ff., II, 894); this was indeed a trophy, the gate concerned being that `which old inhabitants call the Roman Gate,' as Cyriacus says. Indeed, reliefs set in houses may sometimes have taken on a specific meaning, as with that of the `Donna Kinzica' at Pisa (Parra 1983, 468).  

But `museum' implies a greater diversity of trophies, and it was to be principally important churches which, by their display of antiquities, reflected the continuing prestige of their cities. One such was Modena (Rebecchi 1984, 333); another museum embellishes the outside of S. Mark's, Venice (Perry 1977) - a city whose origins in legend were held to be Trojan, and projected by her apologists as a New Rome (Marx 1980). In the matter of materials, this was no less than the truth, for many  of the spolia brought from Ravenna had their origins in Rome. It is clear that the bronze horses, once erected on S. Mark's, were to be interpreted as trophies, yet it seems uncertain whether they were indeed brought from Constantinople with such a specific aim in view, for they appear to have stood in the Arsenal, and risked melting down until, as a Renaissance account has it, they were admired by some Florentines who were `intendenti della scoltura' (Perry 1977, 28). If there was indeed hesitation about their use, could it be because they were supposed to be pagan, and therefore unsuitable for a Christian building? But the rest of the display consists very largely of Christian pieces: the famous `pilastri acritani' have recently been shown to come, not from a civil site at Acre, but from the early sixth-century church of S. Polyeuct in Constantinople (Deichmann 1977-8; although cf. Kalligas 1981, who claims support from the chroniclers for their location at S. John, Acre); indeed, the tradition associating them with Acre can be traced back no further than the sixteenth century. Venetian craftsmen touched them up when they arrived, which was presumably after the sack of 1204. In their extravagant decoration, the `pilastri' show a taste for the exotic which could not be satisfied (at least in such a compact form) by Roman antiquities: from the remains found in the recent excavations of S. Polyeuct, it is clear that the decoration of that church was much more sumptuous than anything available in Ravenna and, to that extent, a worthy target for the Venetians; indeed, it was one of the most sumptuously decorated of Byzantine churches, as a long epigram proclaimed (Gnoli 1971, 31f.). The Venetians may have stipulated Christian rather than pagan work (although conveniently with pagan overtones) for their destined place flanking the entrance to the Baptistery - which would agree with the thirteenth-century Venetians' interest in early Christian art, and the `short-lived attempt on the part of the state to establish artificially a politically inspired, archaizing, pseudo-national art' (Demus 1955, 359). In this instance the Venetians did not destroy a working Christian church for their spoils, for it was already ruinous at the end of the twelfth century; but they did strip the Proconnesian marble slabs from the west façade of Hagia Sophia, and used them to decorate S. Mark's (Goodwin 1977, 17f.). The Pisans did much the same within Italy in 1168, when they sailed up the Tiber `and devastated villas and churches' (Maragone 1936, 44).



An example: the lion and griffon of Perugia


Two works arguably erected as expressions of political power are the great bronze lion and griffon on the Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia: first mentioned in the later thirteenth century, they were placed in 1281 on Arnolfo's fountain, and moved to their present location in 1301 (Magi 1971-2). They were venerated by the people: this included clothing them, and then selling the vestments as relics - just as the statue of Mars on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, according to an account of c. 1330, was festooned with wreaths each year on the last day of March (Weiss 1969, 209). Yet in spite of this, and of their weight and size, there is no record of who made them. Magi, while  scrupulously fair in his presentation of the evidence, clearly believes them both to be antique, partly on grounds of style, and partly because they were already fragmentary in the thirteenth century. However, I can find no hint in the local historians that they were ever considered to be antique: Ciatti, for example, in the course of his very antiquarian book, has a long discourse on the meaning of the griffon in the history of Perugia (1636, 44ff.), and would surely have mentioned our pair had he considered them to be Etruscan products.  

Nevertheless, it is possible that they formed part of some antique, perhaps Etruscan, scheme, and were found during the period when the city was expanding. Rather like the horses in Venice, they serve as trophies, and have been placed in a position of civic prominence: one proof of this is that, from 1358, pieces of ironwork and chains - spoils of war taken from one of the gates of Siena - were hung from their feet, `as a continuing reminder of that deed' (Crispolti 1648, 27). Similar beasts are not rare on mediaeval cathedrals; were these one not placed on a religious structure because they were known to be pagan? Tangential evidence is to hand in the coat of arms of the city, a crowned griffon rampant, adopted only in 1378; and in those of a griffon passant adopted by various guilds in the thirteenth century (Johnstone 1962, 342): it is the passant beast, therefore, which is the earlier form - and one found on Perugian tombs, but only from the twelfth or thirteenth century (ibid., 339). Indeed, because griffons are a constant feature of Etruscan tombs in the region (Johnstone compares the motif of the Moneychangers' Guild with a tomb in Tarquinia: ibid., 346), this evidence suggests that such tombs came to light and were used as exemplars not only for modern tombs, but also for the very symbol of the city. The lion might also be from a funerary source; lions were a common feature of Romanesque churches, and some of them (as at Modena: Rebecchi 1984, 344) are indeed antique; and compare a gloss on the Lion of Brunswick, which is called colossal: `It is a colossus - that is an object in memory of somebody dead, as in the tumuli and statues of the ancients' (L-B no. 2544).  

The complexion of the milieu in which our beasts were either made or unearthed is illustrated by the undoubtedly mediaeval figures of water-carriers on top of the Fontana Maggiore itself (Nicco Fasola 1951, pl. 97-9), made in the late thirteenth century, perhaps by Giovanni Pisano. These are strongly inspired by the antique, and perhaps dependent upon local discoveries of antiquities. The triple group is certainly an idea seen elsewhere in the Middle Ages (cf. the one set of Patriarchs and two sets of Evangelists on the Camposanto, Pisa; also the `atlante' theme discussed in Wentzel 1955, 47ff.), but not in this form, which must be inspired by images of a funerary goddess, perhaps Hecate. The general arrangement, the double-tucked chiton, the hair-style with diadem, the positioning of the arms (cf. statues of Demeter) and the water jug they carry - all declare an antique source, conceivably something found in the local cemeteries. The original group need not have been of a goddess: compare the similar fourth-century support for a sacrificial offering showing dancing maidens as caryatids, now in Delphi Museum. The `flexibility' of the iconography, and its continuing funerary connections, are seen in the use of the motif for the urn of Henry II of France (cf. Goldberg 1966, pl. 47b, 48a-b). There was arguably a late mediaeval fashion for setting antique statues atop modern fountains: the Venus in Siena (said to have been discovered when digging foundations for a house, and soon to be buried on Florentine territory by the decree of 1357, in an attempt to tranfer bad luck to the enemy) had been set on the Fonte Gaia; and the headless antique statue known as Madonna Verona was placed, as already related, on the fountain in Piazza Erbe by Cansignorio della Scala in 1368.


Conclusion


The research of Perry, Demus and others has studied an important aspect of the mediaeval display of antique works of art. Much, however, remains to be done, for arguably the Venetian material is exceptional only because it has survived almost intact into our own day. What is more, Venice had no land walls and gates , and so lacked one of the main display sites for sculptural material. At other cities, antiquities which once occupied positions of prestige similar to that at S. Mark's have been removed into museums, thereby destroying part of the meaning they once held for their inhabitants. The material exists to write a general survey of this fascinating subject, and the present author hopes to begin this work by examining the display of antiquities on city walls and in public places in mediaeval Europe.