Vitale da Bologna

In the path identified by Francesco Arcangeli for rediscovering the “natural, expressive, ‘popular’ component” of Bolognese-Emilian art, Vitale da Bologna is a crucial milestone. 
“At the origins of Emilian expression – and one would be hard pressed to find anything richer or more ingenious – is the art of Vitale da Bologna. It came into being as a dialectical reaction to an art that had recently acquired but already firmly established canons and enduring norms, like that of Florence and Siena; and the reaction had the authority that stems from another, and equally energetic and active, conception of life... In a Bologna that was oscillating between unstable seigniories and short-lived popular regimes, between the high culture of the international ‘studio’ and ancient popular peasant roots, the art of Vitale, who was able to absorb these opposites through the power of physical impulse, is ardent, sensual, imaginative; ready to pass through the existential extremes of life and death ”.
“Vitale’s reds, greens and blues cry out splendidly, as the pinnacle of a palette that maintains its relationship with the browns of the shadows and with the depths of the most hidden sentiments ...
As an inventor of action, as a creator of slices of life, simultaneously incredible and true to life, Vitale is unrivalled in the context of Gothic culture. Only the German Middle Ages ... at times arrive at “a similarly violent, spontaneous action; but that does not touch the heights of Vitale’s disjunction, where sometimes a single body appears to be subjected to opposing movements. … Vitale’s secret is the ‘abruptness’, the sudden deviation by which a movement, an action, after opening in rhythmic elegance, suddenly falls into a brilliant syncopation”. 
It is from this characteristic that one can fully grasp the “savage pathos that is unleashed” in his work... “The slow physical emergence of Wiligelmo’s sculptures in Modena Cathedral, which for Arcangeli represented the first manifestation of an artistic journey profoundly connected to nature. That journey “has been transferred into the intensity of living; into panic; into orgasm. Still remaining though, even if now submerged by the tides of a violently instinctive action, is the substance of flesh and things”.