Head of Christ

At other times – and perhaps at the hands of northern artists, related to sculpture beyond the Alps – the representation of Christ abstracts from any search for human beauty or hedonistic solemnity, in order to symbolise the suffering of the flesh and the victory of the spirit through a crude distortion of the features. The ascending rhythm of the lines, much more accentuated even than in the Deposition at Tivoli, and the marked stylisation are not so much connected with the old Byzantine formulas, albeit revived in the so-called “pathetic” manner, as they mark, in their moving fluctuation, the path by which Romanesque passes decisively into Gothic.