On the arch of the tribune, the Virgin and Child enthroned and guarded by two angels are also represented in mosaic with the symbol of St. John Evangelist. On the opposite side, Pope Benedict XI in prayer (1303-1305) is presented by St. John the Baptist with the symbol of St. Mark the Evangelist. The medallion in the centre of the arch, representing Christ in prayer with the book, is held aloft by two Giottesque angels in fine attitudes; the symbols of the Evangelists Luke and Matthew being depicted at each side in the more modern Florentine manner. The figures of St. Benedict and St. John the Baptist, as well as that of Christ in the medallion of the arch, are modernised; but the rest of the mosaic shows that in 1305, only a few years after the departure of Giotto from Rome, an artist, probably Cavallini, was found willing and able to carry out a Giottesque design.
Had Vasari claimed that Cavallini painted the apsis of San Giorgio-in-Velabro, the subject of which is Christ standing on the orb with the Virgin, St. George on horseback, St. Peter and St. Sebastian at his sides, he would not have been far from the truth. This work indeed seems like a repetition of an older mosaic in the same place, yet the execution betrays something of a Giottesque manner, while the types and slender forms of the saints around Christ are reminiscent of the mosaics of Santa Maria-in-Trastevere. This much-damaged and restored painting, of which the lower half is renewed, was ordered by Cardinal Gaetano Stefaneschi sometime after 1295. It has in fact been ascribed to Giotto himself.
Vasari places Cavallini in Florence and names him as the painter of the Annunciation fresco in the church of San Marco. This painting is very different in character from the paintings and mosaics of Rome. The Virgin sits on the right of an interior on a cushioned bench. Before her is the bending figure of the angel with a vase of lilies in front and traces of a kneeling person behind him. Above, God’s omnipresence is represented by the dove of the Holy Ghost, whose ray alone illuminates the Virgin’s forehead.
This much-damaged and repainted fresco may have been executed by a painter of the fourteenth century. It recalls Angelico, though it may possibly be of an earlier period. The stature and forms of the figures are not without elegance; however, the half-closed eyes, the small mouth and chin, and the absence of feeling betray a less-developed artist. If anything can be assigned to Cavallini in San Marco it is, therefore, not the Annunciation. On the wall to the left, inside the portal of the church, a comparatively recent scraping has brought to light the head of a saint facing the spectators. Other fragments of similar work have been found on the wall to the right, and these may be remnants of Cavallini’s labour.
A spectacular Annunciation at the Santissima Annunziata in the Servi of Florence is a repetition, as regards the subject, of the fresco of San Marco, and so seldom visible to profane eyes that the absence of an opinion may be excused. Richardson notes this particularity, that the Virgin swoons away at the apparition of the angel. A third Annunciation of San Basilio, which undoubtedly perished in the demolition of that church in 1785, completes the series of Cavallini paintings in Florence to which Vasari alludes. Continuing his journey through Italy, Cavallini, according to Vasari, painted a Crucifixion and other incidents of the Passion of the Christ in the north transept of the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi. But the biographer here seems to confound Pietro Cavallini with Pietro Lorenzetti. That he put the materials of Cavallini’s life together slightly haphazardly is sufficiently corroborated in Orvieto, where he assigns him the frescoes of the chapel of the Santissimo Corporate, which are in fact signed by their author, Ugolino di Prete Ilario.
The only disciple of Cavallini, according to Vasari, is Giovanni da Pistoia, who will be delegated a few lines at the appropriate time.
Like the Cathedral at Assisi, The Campo Santo of Pisa was an arena in which the best artists of the time were summoned to exercise their powers; but the influence of the frescoes in the Campo Santo on the progress and development of art was yet more direct and important than that of the paintings in the church of Assisi. One of the most extraordinary and interesting monuments of the Middle Ages, the Campo Santo, once a cemetery though no longer used as such, is an open space of about a 120 metres in length and 35 metres in breadth, enclosed with high walls and an arcade like the cloisters of a monastery or cathedral. On the east side is a large chapel, and on the north two smaller chapels, where prayers and masses are celebrated for the repose of the dead. The open space was filled with earth brought from the Holy Land by the merchant-ships of Pisa, which traded with the Levant in the days of its commercial splendour. This open space, once sown with graves, is now covered with green turf. At the four corners were four tall cypress-trees; their dark, monumental, spiral forms contrasting with a lowly cross in the centre, around which ivy or another creeping plant had wound a luxuriant bower.
The Gothic arcade was designed and built around 1283 by Giovanni Pisano, son of the great Nicola Pisano already mentioned. This arcade, on the side next to the burial ground, is pierced by 62 windows of elegant tracery divided from each other by slender pilasters; upwards of 600 sepulchral monuments of the nobles and citizens of Pisa are ranged along the marble pavements, and mingled with them are some antique remains of great beauty that the Pisans in former times brought from the Greek Isles. Here, also, is the famous sarcophagus which first inspired the genius of Nicola Pisano, and in which had been deposited the body of Beatrice, mother of the famous Countess Matilda. The walls opposite the windows were painted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with scriptural subjects. Prior to World War II, most of these were half ruined by time, neglect, and moisture; some only present fragments, an arm here, a head there, and the best preserved are faded, discoloured, ghastly in appearance, and solemn in subject[4]. The whole atmosphere of this place, particularly to those who wander through its long arcades at dusk when the cypresses assume a blacker hue and the figures on the pictured walls look dim and spectral through the gloom, is moving. In its silence and solitude, something inexpressibly strange, dreamy, solemn, almost dark can be sensed, and the associations connected with its history enchant the imagination. Seen in the broad glare of noon, the place and the pictures lose something of their mystic power and that which last night haunted us as a vision can be examined, studied, and criticised with a colder eye.