Monument of Pope Hadrian V

Although Arnolfo’s known works are not uniform in style and quality of execution, clearly revealing a heavy reliance on assistants, they provide a starting-point for the attribution to him of a large number of other works, most of which were already included by Vasari in Arnolfo’s oeuvre. They belong exclusively to his time in Rome and most have survived in a fragmentary state. The first is the tomb of Pope Adrian V in San Francesco, Viterbo, which was probably made soon after the Pope’s death in 1276. Arnolfo’s responsibility for this work has more recently been questioned, but both the architectural forms and the figure sculpture support the attribution, even if this relatively early work is less richly ornamented with figures than Arnolfo’s later tombs.

The sepulchral monuments executed in the third quarter of the thirteenth century in Rome emerged from the workshop of the Cosmati. In the earlier of them a classical sarcophagus is set in a simple classicizing ciborium, but soon after 1268, in Pietro di Oderisio’s monument of Pope Clement IV in San Francesco, at Viterbo, the ciborium is replaced by a Gothic canopy, and the effigy itself takes on a Northern character. This tomb type was taken over by Arnolfo in the monument of Pope Hadrian V (d. 1276), also at Viterbo, where the importance of the architectural component is much enhanced and the effigy is more strongly carved. In the tomb of Pope Clement IV the sarcophagus is encrusted with the coloured tesserae that are a common feature of works from the Cosmati workshop, and this practice is taken over by Arnolfo in the Hadrian V monument and in his later Roman tombs.