Modena : Italy
Middle Ages
Its exiles founded a new city a few miles to the northwest, still represented by the village of Cittanova. About the end of the 9th century Modena was restored and refortified by its bishop, Ludovicus.
The “Duomo” (cathedral) of Modena is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (illustration, right). Begun under the direction of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany with its first stone laid June 6, 1099 and its crypt ready for the city’s patron, Saint Geminianus, and consecrated only six years later, the Duomo of Modena was finished in 1184. The building of a great cathedral in this flood-prone ravaged former center of Arianism was an act of urban renewal in itself, and an expression of the flood of piety that motivated the contemporary First Crusade. Unusually, the master builder’s name, Lanfranco, was celebrated in his own day: the city’s chronicler expressed the popular confidence in the master-mason from Como, Lanfranco: by God’s mercy the man was found (inventus est vir). The sculptor Wiligelmus who directed the mason’s yard was praised in the plaque that commemorated the founding. The program of the sculpture is not lost in a welter of detail: the wild dangerous universe of the exterior is mediated by the Biblical figures of the portals leading to the Christian world of the interior. In Wiligelmus’ sculpure at Modena, the human body takes on a renewed physicality it had lost in the schematic symbolic figures of previous centuries. At the east end, triple apses express the articulation into nave and wide aisles (illustration, right) in bold and clear masses. Modena’s Duomo inspired campaigns of cathedral and abbey building in emulation through the valley of the Po. The Gothic campanile (1224 – 1319) is called La Ghirlandina from the bronze garland surrounding the weathercock.
When it began to build its cathedral in 1099, the city was part of the possessions of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany; but by the time the edifice was consecrated by Pope Lucius III in 1184, it was a free commune. In the wars between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX Modena sided with the emperor.
Other churches in Modena, the church of San Giovanni Decollato (“the Baptist Beheaded”) contains a polychrome terracotta Pieta by Guido Mazzoni (1450-1518). The Baroque Este Pantheon (the church of S. Agostino, containing works of sculpture in honor of the house of Este) is by Bibbiena.
