Processions of Female Saints

Hieratic yet gentle, rigid in compositional scheme yet tender in modelling - which gives the faces in relief an unusual fleshy prominence - the saints of Cividale, the exquisite product of a cultivated art, constitute another controversial problem of chronology. Placed by scholars anywhere between the 8th and the 11th century, the uncertainty of their dating seems to keep them emblematically suspended outside time and to isolate them in their own difficult, unrepeatable beauty.