first, to stand in a small building, but under the dome of a vast Cathedral, he designed it on a larger scale, with eight instead of six sides, but despite these increased proportions it is less effective than that in the Baptistry at Pisa, perhaps because it is surrounded by so many other objects of interest. It is also less harmonious, as a work of art, owing to its elaborately ornamented Renaissance staircase which, though admirable in itself, conflicts in style with the main body of the pulpit.* Supported upon columns resting on the backs of lions, and enriched with statuettes like its prototype, it differs from it in having its flat spaces filled with tracery, leaves, and gilded glass mosaics, as well as in the greater number of its bas-reliefs. Two of these, the Nativity and the Crucifixion, differ very slightly from those of the same subjects at Pisa; two, the Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt, are original compositions; and two, the Adoration and the Last Judgment, are old subjects varied in treatment. The Adoration is less clear and simple in composition, and the Last Judgment even more crowded than that at Pisa, although in other respects of superior merit. This defect of overcrowding, which is less marked in the Pisan than in the Sienese reliefs, none of which are free from it, is most excusable in the Last Judgment, which could hardly be treated successfully in sculpture, unless by the Greek method of using a few typical figures to represent a multitude. Such a device was unknown to Niccola who, undeterred by the difficulties of his task, undertook and accomplished it with no small credit to himself.

The Padre della Valle in speaking of the Sienese pulpit says,

Said to be the work of Il Marrina, a Sienese sculptor of the first half of the sixteenth century. See ch. iv. p. 67.

+ By a celebrated glass-worker, painter, and sculptor of Siena, named Pastorino Pastorini (1531-1560), scholar of Guglielmo Marcilla, or Di Marcillac, a French painter on glass and in fresco, who painted the windows in the episcopal palace at Arezzo, and the round window of the Duomo at Siena. Pastorini attained great reputation by his portraits in the round, in medals of coloured wax, and medallions in bronze. From 1554 to 1557 he worked at Ferrara for Duke Hercules II. See Commentary to the Life of Guglielmo de Marcillac, Vasari, ed. Milanesi, vol. iv., p. 433

that the first Sienese and Florentine sculptors issued from it as the Greeks from the Trojan horse.* In so far as their art owed its revival to Niccola Pisano, this observation is justly applicable to all parts of Tuscany. The capacity of the sixty workers in stone who kept open shop at Siena when he came there, may be estimated by such rude bas-reliefs as those of the Birth of Christ and the Adoration of the Magi in the chapel of Sant' Ansano at the Cathedral. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Pulpit had done its work of regeneration, Siena produced a number of sculptors who were thought worthy to assist in building and decorating the façade of the Cathedral at Orvieto under Lorenzo Maitani, himself a Sienese, and one of the greatest of Tuscan architects and sculptors. Leaving these facts to speak for themselves, we may pass on to discuss the remaining portion of Niccola Pisano's life.

Soon after the completion of his pulpit at Siena, the last scene in that struggle between the papal and imperial powers which began in his youth, had been played out on the battle field of Tagliacozzo; the last scion of the Hohenstauffens had died. the death of a felon, and Charles of Anjou had finally seated himself on the throne of Frederic II. To commemorate the victory which gave it to him, the monarch commissioned Niccola Pisano to build an abbey and convent near the battlefield, within which the bones of the slain should be buried, and daily and nightly masses for the repose of their souls. said by the Templars. The site selected for these buildings, whose origin is marked only by the name of an adjoining church, Sta. Maria della Vittoria,§ was the height, about ten miles from Tagliacozzo, where the ill-fated Conradino first halted in his march from Rome. Looking from it over the little town of La Scorgola, with houses clustering upon * Lettere Sanesi, vol. i. p. 279. The pulpit was probably finished in November, 1268.

+ With the architects they formed a guild, ruled by three rectors and a chamberlain elected for six months, who became ineligible for three years after they retired from office.

The pulpit is supposed to have been completed in November, 1267, and the battle was fought in August, 1268. See Appendix, letter B.

Carlo Promis, Degli Artefici Marmoraii Romani, p. 15, note 22. A festival to commemorate the victory of Charles of Anjou is held at Santa Maria della Vittoria every hundred years.

the hiii-side, the traveller commands an exquisite view of the fatal plain, the sparkling lake, the grand background of mountains whose chain culminates in the snow-capped Velino, and of the ruins of the old Marsian city of Alba, which supplied a mass of material for the construction of the now ruined abbey. When Niccola himself stood there, we cannot doubt that he remembered the days, then half a century past, when he won his first laurels in the kingdom of Naples, where he was now to build a monument intended to commemorate the overthrow of the house, and the extinction of the race, of his early friend and patron, Frederic II.

The last work of importance in which our sculptor had a share was the fountain in the square of the Cathedral at Perugia. The inscription mentions his name and that of his son Giovanni who, as we know from other sources, had the assistance of his fellow-pupil Arnolfo di Cambio in its completion. It consists of two superposed basins, the upper of which is decorated with. twenty-four statues in niches, representing prophets and saints. and the two Podestas who ruled Perugia while the fountain was in progress.* These simple, broadly-draped figures were sculptured by Niccola at Pisa, whence they were sent to Giovanni who remained at Perugia to sculpture the bas-reliefs upon the sides of the lower basin, which for the most part consist of single figures symbolic of the months and the seven liberal arts, together with coats-of-arms, the Guelphic lion, the Griffin of Perugia, the Eagle of Pisa twice repeated, as well as some of Esop's fables, and Rhea with the twins and their nurse the Roman wolf. Proud of their beautiful fountain, the magistrates enacted severe laws for its preservation, in which it is mentioned as the most valuable possession of the city, and as unique, not only in Italy but in the world; encomiums which, in its present state of decay, seem somewhat exaggerated. While still engaged upon it, Giovanni, hearing of the dangerous illness of his father, travelled homewards, but being detained

The bronze work was cast by a Maestro Rossi, of Perugia, in 1277; perhaps the same artist who, fourteen years earlier, made the ball of the cupola of the Duomo at Siena.

+ The Trivium, in the Middle Ages, was a course of elementary instruction in Grammar, Dialectics, and Rhetoric; the Quadrivium, in Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy.

Vermiglioli, op. cit. preface.

in Florence, did not reach Pisa until Niccola had breathed his last (1278).

Inestimable were the services rendered to art by this eminent man. He gave the death blow to Byzantinism and barbarism, established new architectural principles, opened men's eyes to the degraded state of art by showing them where to study, and how to study, and founded a new school of sculpture in Italy. Never hurried by an ill-regulated imagination into extravagance he was careful in selecting his models of style, and his methods of self-cultivation; an indefatigable worker, who spared neither time nor strength in obedience to the numerous calls made upon him from all parts of the peninsula, he is to be found now in Pisa, then in Naples, Padua, Siena, Lucca, or Florence, here to design a church, there to model a bas-relief, erect a pulpit, a palace or a tower. By turns architect and sculptor, great in both arts, original in both, a reviver in both, laying deep and well the foundations of his edifices by hitherto unpractised methods, and sculpturing his bas-reliefs upon principles evolved from the study of antique models long unheeded, he held the same relation to Italian art which Dante held to Italian literature, and was a truly great man whose claims to remembrance can never be forgotten.

CHAPTER II.

THE SCHOLARS OF NICCOLA PISANO.

It seems at first sight strange that an artist of such extraordinary genius as Niccola Pisano should not have formed scholars content to repeat his types and work in his spirit, but we understand the reason when we look at the eclectic character of his work, and consider the unsettled state of men's minds about art at this time. To shape others, a man must himself have definite ideas, and these Niccola had not. Wanting in fixed principles, and having no style of predilection, he welded divers heterogeneous elements into units though an instinct peculiar to himself. After his day, when Gothic influences predominated in architecture, his chief pupils submitted to them more or less completely, and in sculpture, as in architecture, their works show little trace of their previous training. Forced to seek other paths than those in which their master had walked, they turned to nature, and endeavoured to express the emotions of the soul in the countenances and attitudes of the figures which they introduced into their compositions, striving, however incompletely, to catch the spirit of the time, and make their art intelligible to their contemporaries.

This is especially the case with Giovanni Pisano, of whom we purpose to speak in this chapter, after saying a few words about his fellow scholars under Niccola. The reader has already made sufficient acquaintance with one of them, Fra Guglielmo Agnelli, so that we may pass on to the three Florentines, Lapo, Donato di Ricevuto, and Goro di Ciuccio Ciuti, who assisted their master at Siena, where they settled with their families, and received the honours of citizenship. Lapo, who was perhaps the author of the monument to Hecuba, Queen of Cyprus, in the Cathedral of Assisi,* built the barracks of St. Angelo in Colle (1281), and nine years later commanded an expedition sent by the Sienese to destroy the possessions of the Caccia conti. Donato is only once spoken of as head* See Appendix, letter C.