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Updated: May 25, 2025
The lion at the left end of the façade is also a copy, the original by Donatello being in the Bargello, close by; but the pedestal is Donatello's original. This lion is the Marzocco, the legendary guardian of the Florentine republic, and it stood here for four centuries and more, superseding one which was kissed as a sign of submission by thousands of Pisan prisoners in 1364.
This tomb is remarkable as the earliest instance of the canopy withdrawn by attendant angels from the dead man's form, afterwards so frequently adopted by the Pisan school. Giov. Villani, viii. 26. See Milizia, vol. i. p. 135. These walls were not finished till some, time after Arnolfo's death. They lost their ornament of towers in the siege of 1529, and they are now being rapidly destroyed.
Thus, the Pisan Romanesque might in an instant be pronounced to have been formed under some measure of Lombardic influence, from the oblique squares set under its arches; and in it we have the spirit of northern Gothic affecting details of the southern; obliquity of square, in magnificently shafted Romanesque.
It was a neat little book, of about the medium height, and sold well on the trains, for the Pisan newsboys on the cars were very affable, as they are now, and when they came and leaned an armful of these books on a passenger's leg and poured into his ear a long tale about the wonderful beauty of the work, and then pulled in the name of the book from the rear of the last car, where it had been hanging on behind, the passenger would most always buy it and enough of the name to wrap it up in.
For this object he drew as his cartoon, 'Pisan soldiers surprised while bathing by a sudden trumpet call to arms. The grand cartoon, of which only a small copy exists, was said to have been torn to pieces as an act of revenge by a fellow-sculptor, whom Michael Angelo had offended.
We pierce them with circles; and we have, if the circles are small and the stonework strong, the traceries of Giotto and the Pisan school; if the circles are as large as possible and the bars slender, those which I have already figured and described as the only perfect traceries of the Northern Gothic.
The right man can make anything interesting, just as Dean Swift could write an entrancing essay with the broomstick as a central theme. The man's the thing, Hamlet to the contrary, notwithstanding. Galileo knew the Florentine heart, and so he gave lectures on a Florentine: one Dante, who loved a girl named Beatrice. The young Pisan drew diagrams of Dante's Inferno and surely it was nobody's else.
Behind him loomed up the massive Palazzo Vecchio, with its high tower, sharply cut, and set with deep machicolations; to the left, the splendid Loggia of Orgagna, filled with rare marbles, and the long picture-gallery of the Uffizi, heaped with the rarest art-treasures of the world; to his right, the Giant Fountain of Ammanato, throwing jets of pure water one drop of which outvalues all the nostrums in the world; and in front, the Post Office, built centuries before, by Pisan captives.
Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan school for example, in the rough abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the façade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the same sense of beauty.
The method of treatment adopted for these chapters has obliged me to give priority to Florence, and to speak of the two Lorenzetti, Pietro in the Pisan Campo Santo and Ambrogio in the Sala della Pace at Siena, as though they were followers of Giotto; so true is it that the main currents of Tuscan art were governed by Florentine influences, and that Giotto's genius made itself felt in all the work of his immediate successors.
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