This anonymous sculptor, one of the most singular and influential
personalities of the Romanesque period, gets his name from a sculpted
tympanum illustrating three scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary in
the Church of Cabestany in the Rossiglione area (eastern Pyrenees). It
shows the Virgin, held up by Christ, as she comes out of the sepulchre,
on the left, the Assumption on the right, and Christ between the Virgin
and St. Thomas in the centre.
The corpus of his work was reconstructed
by Durliat on the basis of his recurrent use of certain stylistic
motifs and techniques, like, for example, his triangular shaped heads,
with thick hair almost completely covering the foreheads, his use of a
drill at the corners of the large oval eyes, on the feet and the hands,
as well as his sensitively carried out faces and compact composition,
where every space is filled in by a figure. This artist travelled a
great deal and left works of art in various parts of Spain, France and
Italy, from Navarre to Tuscany, and also left his traces in Catalonia
and the Languedoc.
The Master of Cabestany, active in the second half
of the 12th century, must have learnt his trade by initially studying
and imitating ancient art, or so it would appear from the reliefs on
the sarcophagus in the Abbey of St. Hilarius in Languedoc, which
illustrates episodes referring to the martyrdom of the Saint. This
remarkable classicism, which is one of the main characteristics of his
artistic production, certainly must have influenced the formation of
Romanesque sculpture in Tuscany, where the artist carried out at least
two important works: the shaft of the column, an early work, in the
Museum of Religious Art of San Casciano Val di Pesa, and a capital
representing Daniel in the Lion's Den in the Abbey of Sant'Antimo,
which contains elements of his maturity, when he tried to create more
daring designs and a more marked expressionism. |
