We need not here further emphasise the boldness of an earthly warrior’s celebrating his own triumph in a day when men recognised only One as victor. A strongly fortified bridgehead had been in course of construction since 1234 in front of the town of Capua, to guard the Via Appia where it crossed the Volturno. The fortification itself, the plan of which the Emperor had sketched with his own hands, seems to have been roughly finished by 1239. It was probably about this time, when Frederick was returning as Triumphator to his own kingdom, that he decided to adorn the gate of the bridge with sculptures and develop it into an ornamental arch. “The magnificent marble portal” which has been so much praised was not completed till 1247. This work of art, begotten of the Hohenstaufen rule in Sicily, was much admired throughout Renaissance times.
It must not be compared with the Arch of Trajan in the adjacent Benevento. The combination of fortification and triumphal arch recalls rather the gate of the Castel Nuovo in Naples which was erected two centuries later by Alfonso I of Aragon, a ruler who in many points is a true heir of Frederick II. We are told that “two towers of astounding size, beauty and strength” flanked the entrance to the Capuan Gate. Everything was faced with marble or a stone resembling marble; the hewn stones, as in all Frederick’s buildings, were so skilfully fitted that the joints secured by molten lead were practically invisible. The victories and triumphs of Frederick were portrayed in relief. The side that faced the town was adorned with figures of Mercury, and the keystone was a laurel-crowned head of Jupiter (possibly plundered from the neighbouring amphitheatre of Capua). The outer side that faced the traveller who was approaching Capua along the Via Appia was more ornate. Gigantic statues, all carved by Frederick’s own sculptors, filled the niches. We are not absolutely certain of the arrangement of the figures, but everything indicates that in the highest place of all there stood a female form, double or even treble life-size, whose powerful and beautiful head is still extant. The features recall the majesty, the reflective power, the serenity of a Farnese Juno. In spite of the general antique effect of this colossal figure the details are not indebted to antique models. The hand of this goddess is pointing to her breast, where instead of a heart the imperial eagle stretches his wings and claws—perhaps the scarcely-tamed eagle of the coins.
This figure probably stood alone, crowning the summit of the structure. The eagle is not the only indication that this figure stands in intimate relation to that of Frederick himself in the niche immediately below. The armies of the French Revolution shattered the head of this figure and have left only the trunk, but much can be deduced from even the fragments of this life-size statue. Frederick was represented, as on the Augustales, wearing the mantle of the Roman Imperator, but otherwise the usual dress of his day; his beardless, still-youthful face (deduced from a gem) looking straight before him, scanning the new arrival with his calm unruffled gaze. His forearm is stretched out in an attitude half of menace, half of benediction, familiar in certain pictures of Christ. Two fingers of one hand were raised “as if,” says the chronicler, “his mouth were about to give voice to the resonant threatening of the verses” which are engraved in a semicircle above his head. They form a distich: the hexameter is apparently spoken by the Goddess above:
At the bidding of Caesar I stand, guarantor for the peace of the kingdom.
The pentameter is assigned to Frederick himself:
In wrath I shall ruin the man whom I know to be faithless.
This couplet forms a second link between Frederick and the Goddess.
Two other figures give the clue to the identity of the exalted figure who is represented as larger than the Emperor, and stands above him and yet with him forms a unity. Right and left of the Emperor and probably slightly lower, very possibly one on each of the towers, are two busts which are usually interpreted with extreme probability as two High Court Judges: the one Piero della Vigna, the other Thaddeus of Suessa. Each of their niches bears a hexameter. The one offers the invitation:
Enter with confidence all who purpose to live without trepass;
while the second threatens:
He who is faithless may fear to end as an exile in fetters.
This more than human female form, which later patriotism interpreted as a representation of the town of Capua, can have been no other genius than the “Justitia Augusti,” one with Caesar and yet greater than man, and exalted even above the Emperor: Justice communicating her commands through the Emperor to the Judges. Frederick II in life: “Father and Son of Justitia.”
The composition of the three-storied Capuan Gate tells the same tale as the relief in the palace at Naples, where the multitude, awed by the fear of the Lord, kneel before incarnate Justice. There was no need to portray the multitude on the triumphal arch; they were represented by the living passers-by, who if they did not pause to kneel would yet shudder before the threatening Judgment Day. It was certainly Frederick’s intention here to inspire the people with fear of the divine imperial power by this image of himself, by the impression on the eye—“whose sight is more potent than aught that the ear perceives.” The chronicler confirms this hypothesis, for he himself felt the effect the Emperor intended: “The threatening verses were inscribed to inspire fear in those who passed through the gate and fear in those to whom the figures themselves spake.”
We recall the Sicilian representatives of the “Pantocrator” or “Immanuel,” “famous in his majesty, terrible in his glory,” figures of Christ still Byzantine in style, with unmoved gaze, slightly oblique, almost cruel, compelling perhaps a shuddering love through the fear of sword and lawbook which the threatening-blessing figure holds in its hands.
Such fear Frederick II definitely sought to evoke. The Sicilian Kingdom of Peace and of Justice whose threshold was marked by this Gate of Judgment could only be maintained, to quote Piero della Vigna, “by the fear which the Emperor inspired who was skilled both to correct and to chastise by the rod of his victory”… a spirit close akin to Dante’s, who inscribed the verse: “All hope abandon ye who enter here,” over the gate that led into the realm of God’s Justice.
People of those days were ready to give an ecclesiastical-allegorical turn to the interpretation of the gate of Capua. The Gesta Romanorum first describe the portal with accuracy, and then provide a strange interpretation: the Emperor’s figure becomes that of our Lord Jesus Christ. The marble gate represents Holy Church through which men enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The female figure of Justice becomes the Saviour’s Virgin Mother and the Vigna bust John the Evangelist. Even the courtiers could scarcely have given an interpretation more flattering to their imperial master. The pious writer, however, had another end in view. This building and these figures which display no solitary Christian symbol—the Emperor has not even a cross upon his crown but is wearing the simple Roman pointed diadem—must be robbed of their dangerous pagan suggestion and ecclesiasticised. As a cardinal wrote about Frederick, however, in another context, “The stones hurled against him by the Pope turn to straw, like filth he scatters the gold of the papal anathema, he lets the rays of the sun fall upon him, and he fears the God of the Lightning as little as an archer with his bow.”
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The Church looked askance at this new art, and amongst the papalists it became an obsession to accuse the Ghibellines of idol- and image-worship. Even Dante did not escape: he was said to have placed wax figures in smoke. It must have seemed an unspeakable hubris that the same Emperor who denied the general immortality of the soul should cause the perishable body to be carved in stone “for eternal and undying memory.” “Frederick dares to alter laws and epochs” was the papal verdict on the “Transformer of the World.”
Sicilian plastic art would have been unthinkable without the glorification of the World Ruler and the World Judge, and was indeed so entirely grounded thereon that, apart from a few late echoes, monumental art in the antique style died with the death of Frederick II. A Gothic reaction set in everywhere, superseding the antique which
had been reawakened by the State for the glory of the State.
For many decades to come there was no call for the representation of godlike man; only one Emperor had been able to inspire and to compel this homage. After him no one individual was sufficiently pre-eminent; without the Emperor, the unique ruler who is “the one thing that exists in its own integrity and forms no part of another,” the life-giving breath was lacking. Thus it fell out that the magic glory of the Caesars that had suddenly blazed up in the south with Frederick perished with him and died away like a terrifying but seductive emanation of Lucifer.
Not the least part of the miracle lay in Frederick’s finding the artists who could carry out such unwonted tasks in a form so perfect. For the products of these imperial sculptors reached a level which Italian art did not soon regain. The amazing thing was that Frederick drew these artists from his own Sicilian kingdom, and begot as it were his own sculptors, as he had earlier begotten his own poets. How he conjured this ability from his simple Apulian stone-masons is a mystery. He required it for the glorification of his State and his State Gods, and what he required he was wont to get.
The names of some of these masters are known. They were for the most part natives of Apulia and the Capitanata. Their names throw no light on the mystery. The creative force was not theirs. These masons were instructed to follow closely the antique models; the first school of art that worked systematically from the antique, directed by one master mind, was the imperial School of Sculpture in Apulia. Without the compulsion which the Emperor exercised the work of the Sicilian sculptors ceased, though a son of the imperial master-craftsman, Bartholomew of Foggia, was still able to carry out a noble work, the bust of Sigilgaita at Ravello. Only one exception might perhaps be made in favour of Nicholas of Pisa.
It seems no longer in doubt that this artist, though later settled in Pisa, was a native of Apulia. Vasari, who counts him as the earliest master of plastic art in the Italian Renaissance, relates him vaguely to the Sicilian school and to the master of the Capuan Gate. It is by no means impossible that Nicholas had learned and worked anonymously amongst the imperial sculptors of his native country before, in 1260, he created his first masterpiece, the pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa. Whether Nicholas of Pisa was directly or indirectly the bringer of new vision to Italy, there is no doubt that sculpture after the antique spread, as vernacular poetry had spread, from south to north, from Sicily to Upper Italy. It was noticed from the beginning that poetry and the new plastic art alike struck their first roots in the imperial towns of Italy. Nicholas’s first works were created in Pisa, Siena, Pistoia, at a time when these towns lay under papal interdict.
Vasari records that Nicholas of Pisa learnt his craftsmanship by copying ancient vases and sarcophagi. Where was this done elsewhere in Italy, and where, with such method as in the imperial School in Apulia, in which this exercise was imposed by Frederick as a duty? Who opened the eyes of the Apulian, and indirectly, therefore, of the Italian masters, to see and appreciate the works of the ancients, if not the man who in other spheres taught men “to draw new water from old wells”? Frederick did not himself wield hammer and chisel, yet the sculptors are his creatures and his pupils. A recent French art-critic exclaims: C’est l’empereur qui a été le vrai sculpteur!
There is no reason to doubt that the true statesman can evoke a new art of poetry, of architecture and of sculpture, the more that the magic of the chisel thrives best in the ordered atmosphere of a living state, in which the voice of the community begins to make itself heard. Thus this Hohenstaufen Emperor, whom men hailed as the image of God, who was the first human incarnation of Universal Law, became by the glorification of his state and of his person the founder of a new plastic art, consciously drawing its inspiration from the pagan. Almost contemporaneously a new school of painting was born within the Church, which based itself immediately on the reanimated myth of early Christian worship. The recent theory is that the glorification of St. Francis fired the new “Gothic” painting.
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In March 1240 Frederick II returned to his Sicilian kingdom, but all his thoughts and plans were now directed to the development of the Italian monarchy. In spite of having been absent for five years, in spite of having spent four in almost continuous campaigning in Upper and Central Italy, he allowed himself only a few weeks of rest in his beloved Sicily. “Such yearning and care for the pacification of Italy impels us… that neither the need of rest nor recreation, nor yet the delights of our kingdom can hold us back. When with diligence and perseverance we had accomplished the great tasks which were inherent in our greatest task of all, we speedily quitted Sicily without rest, which would have been fatal to our activity, and fared forth in the heat of summer and the dust of the camp, eschewing dangers neither to our faithful followers nor to ourselves.”
After a Diet in Foggia, the complete restaffing of all Sicilian offices, and the promulgation of a number of new laws, Frederick was in May 1240 actually again encamped near Capua with the newly-levied army. In June he advanced against the frontier of the Papal States. His intention was to compel the Romans to open their gates and the Pope to make peace if possible, by a campaign of devastation in the Roman Campagna. At the last moment the Emperor had to change his plans. The new Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Conrad of Thuringia, arrived as envoy from the secular and spiritual princes of Germany who hoped as intermediaries to negotiate a peace between Emperor and Pope, as they had been successful in doing after the Crusade.
The Pope’s proceedings against Frederick had completely failed in their effect. From over-frequent use the ban had lost its edge, and was no longer the formidable weapon it had been of yore; the release of subjects from their allegiance had likewise worn thin. The sentence of excommunication was, it is true, to be pronounced anew every Sunday from every pulpit in the world with burning of candles and tinkling of bells. This, no doubt, took place in foreign countries, though often under protest. In those very countries, however, where the reading of the papal bull was most vital to Pope Gregory, within the Empire itself, there was no lack of resistance and obstruction. Innumerable communities in Italy were themselves under the ban for the most various reasons, and no Church service was being held in them in any case. Every town which Frederick visited fell automatically under an interdict, and we may fairly doubt whether in any case any bishop throughout Imperial Italy would have dared to read the ban: and in Sicily it is improbable that any single priest was found to incur the risk to life and property. Moreover, all adherents of the Emperor’s, like the Archbishop of Palermo, were also excommunicate, and any Sicilian bishop who was not an adherent was speedily banished.
In Germany also numerous spiritual princes refused to proclaim the excommunication from the pulpit. The bishops of Germany were as reluctant as the secular princes to imperil their rights as lords of the land by taking sides against the Emperor to whom they owed so great an extension of these rights. They rarely went so far as to make any move against the Pope, and certainly not against the Emperor: for the most part they calmly looked on.
Pope Gregory may well have hoped to win over the princes, usually so ready to revolt against the Emperor, and to turn them against this Hohenstaufen, as Innocent III had so successfully done against the Welf Otto. But Gregory’s expectations were disappointed, as at the time of the Crusade. His attempt to set up a rival king failed utterly; the envenomed letters in which he posed as the protector of princely privilege which Frederick was seeking to undermine fell on deaf ears, as did his insinuations that Frederick was seeking to destroy all Christian princes and magnates by the hands of his assassins in order to rule alone. Frederick II had succeeded beyond belief in attaching the princes to himself, and they viewed the situation clearly. First the spiritual and then the secular princes wrote unanimously to the Pope, and stated in the clearest and most unequivocal language that the sole cause of the ban was the Pope’s having espoused the cause of those arch-traitors, the Lombards. The princes recalled t
hat their position was a dual one: on the one hand as prelates they were sons of the Church, on the other hand as princes of the Empire they were vassals of the Emperor, and that they must not fail in their duty as members of the Empire; they would greatly grieve if they were driven to mourn for the Church. At the same time they offered the Pope their assistance in re-establishing between him and the Emperor the peace they most earnestly desired to see. All the princes joined in one great common declaration, and, further, each wrote separately, describing the confusion into which the world had been plunged by this new quarrel, and imploring the Pope to release the Emperor from the ban.
The German Grand Master had just at this moment reached the Pope bearing the princes’ proposals, and Frederick did not care to jeopardise the arbitration by a new invasion of the Patrimonium. The Emperor had, it is true, no hope that the stiff-necked Pope would accept any peace that was not wrung from him, and the negotiations in fact proved fruitless.
With unblushing effrontery the Pope suddenly announced that he could release the Emperor from the excommunication incurred by his heresy, godlessness and persecution of the Church, only if the enemies of the Emperor, the Lombards, were included in the peace. Though Pope Gregory had always firmly denied that the Lombard question was in any way connected with the excommunication, and had made the most far-fetched allegations in his bulls and manifestos (though it was known in the market-place that he had banned the Emperor to save the Lombards from his vengeance), yet now Frederick’s release was to be effected, not by penance for acknowledged sin, but by political concessions to the Lombards. We can hardly wonder that the negotiations broke down; not even an armistice was achieved. All subsequent peace overtures foundered on the same reef; the Curia clung to the Lombard clause, and Frederick with perfect justice refused to buy his absolution at the price. The German Grand Master died a few weeks after his arrival in Rome, and Frederick meantime had resumed the fighting in the Romagna, though not in the Patrimonium.
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