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The innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian some, like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless donkeys.
And so, the matter being considered and determined, Cesare quitted Rome on the 12th and left it for the Pope to give answer to the Pisan envoys in the Consistory of June 14 that neither his Holiness nor the Duke of Valentinois could assent to the proposals which Pisa made. From Rome Cesare travelled swiftly to Spoleto, where his army, some ten thousand strong, was encamped.
If you begin to question, hereupon, who was the Italian robber, whether of marble or thought, and look to your Vasari, you find the building attributed to John the Pisan; and you suppose the son to have been so pleased by his father's adoption of Gothic forms that he must needs borrow them, in this manner, ready made, from the Germans, and thrust them into his round arches, or wherever else they would go.
For Pisa herself is soon lost in the vagueness of a world thus delicately touched by sun and cloud, and seemingly so full of ruinous or deserted things like the beautiful great Church of Settimo, whose tower you may see far away in the golden summer weather standing quite alone in a curve of the river; so that you leave the highway and following a little by-road come upon Pieve di S. Cassiano, a basilica in the ancient Pisan manner set among the trees in a shady place, and over the three doors of the façade you find the beautiful work of Biduino da Pisa, as it is said, sculptures in relief of the resurrection of Lazarus, the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, a fight of dragons, and certain subjects from the Bestiaries.
This spontaneous mediæval sculpture, aided by the antique, preceded by a full half-century the appearance of mediæval painting; and it was from the study of the works of the Pisan sculptors that Cimabue and Giotto learned to depart from the mummified monstrosities of the hieratic, Byzantine and Roman style of Giunta and Berlinghieri.
I reproduce from the Pisan edition the punctuation 'When like Apollo, from his golden bow'; but I think the exact sense would be better brought out if we read 'When, like Apollo from his golden bow, The Pythian, &c. 'The Pythian of the age one arrow sped, And smiled. Byron is here assimilated to Apollo Pythius Apollo the Python-slayer.
"The king," says Christine de Pisan, "showed no great outward emotion, and quite coolly, as if the topic of conversation were something else, turned and looked about him, and, seeing one of his secretaries, summoned him courteously, and bade him, in a whisper, write word to Louis de Sancerre, his marshal, to come to him directly.
It had ever been the plan of Milan to weaken Florence by aiding Pisa, and to weaken Pisa by this continual war, for it was the Visconti's dream to carry their dominion into Tuscany. Now at this time, amid all these disasters, the Pisan ambassador at Milan was a certain Giovanni dell' Agnello, a merchant, ambitious but without honour.
But first he sent seven Messinese galleys to attack Palermo under the command of Richard de Riso, who in 1268 had dared with a few vessels to confront the whole Pisan fleet, and who was now to lose in civil war his honor as a citizen and his reputation as a leader; for uniting with four galleys from Amalfi, under the command of Matthew del Giudice and Roger of Salerno, he proceeded to blockade the port of Palermo, and, as he was unable to effect anything else, approached the walls and caused the name of Charles to be shouted aloud, together with insults and menaces to the citizens.
Some tapers continue to burn; while some suns have perished. Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime. The word God is printed in the Pisan edition with a capital letter: it may be questioned whether Shelley meant to indicate anything more definite than 'some higher power Fate.
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