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Updated: June 16, 2025
From the pavement to the top of the cross it is 380 feet. The beautiful Campanile tower is encased with strips of differently coloured marbles, adorned with bas-reliefs and statues. It is 269 feet in height, being ascended by some 415 steps. The view from the top is very extensive. The adjacent Baptistery is on the site of the Temple of Mars.
After the beautiful convention of Byzantium had passed away, and Gruamone and Adeodatus had carved at Pistoja, Biduinus at S. Cassiano, Robertus at Lucca, Bonamicus and Bonannus at Pisa, and Guido da Como again at Pistoja, in the work of Niccolò Pisano at Pisa we come upon the first thought of the Renaissance, the reliefs of the pulpit in the Baptistery, in which the Middle Age seems to have passed over the work of Antiquity almost like a caress.
The bronze folding doors came from the Mosque of St. Sophia at Stamboul; the pillars at the entrance of the baptistery were part of the booty of Arre; while there are three red flagstones on which Barbarossa knelt to do reverence to St. Peter, in the person of the Pope. The guide held a lighted taper on one side of the column, that we might observe its glowing transparency.
The ambo in the right aisle, made up of columns and carved slabs of the sixth century, is due to him, as are the chapels to right and left of the nave. The present pavement was laid down in 1880, when some inscriptions of the Euphrasian period were removed to the baptistery.
Nothing could be more quaintly old and modest than the baptistery of Riez. It is a small square building of rough cemented stone whose stucco has worn away. The roof is tiled, and from out a flattened dome, blades of grass sprout sparsely.
Steady climbing now, and then a turn to the right and we see Pelago before us, perched on its crags, and by and by come to it a tiny town, with a clean and alluring inn, very different from the squalor of Pontassieve: famous in art and particularly Florentine art as being the birthplace of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the Baptistery doors.
The book has since been rebound, leaves taken from another copy having been bound in between the damaged pages. The lower part of the west tower is used as a baptistery; this is separated from the nave by a screen, formed of fragments of the old rood screen.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could trace such a resemblance between this rectangular ambo and the hexagonal structure in the Pisan Baptistery as would justify them in asserting both to be the products of the same school.
It was a merchant guild which thought happily of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named, as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa.
Only a group of Jews stoning Stephen, and Lawrence before the tribunal, remind us by dramatic energy of the Brancacci Chapel. The Baptistery frescoes, dealing with the legend of S. John, show a remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. A soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a vigorous figure, full of Florentine realism.
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