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They wandered about looking at the old pictures, seeking especially those by Andrea del Sarto, who was the only artist familiar to them, whose paintings are there. Then, going out, they climbed the famous Leaning Tower, and visited the Baptistery, where is Niccolo Pisano's wonderful sculptured marble pulpit.
There was one little boy, especially, who loved old Pisano, and whom old Pisano loved more than anybody else in the world. This was Antonio Canova, Pisano's grandson, who had come to live with him, because his father was dead, and his mother had married a harsh man, who treated the little Antonio roughly.
But that it was noble, simple, and consistent, and free from the petty foibles that too frequently beset genius, may be fairly presumed from the works he has left behind him, and from the eloquent silence of tradition." Of the circumstances of Niccola Pisano's death, or the ceremonials practised at it, we are thus left in ignorance.
It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Vespignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano's death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet discredited, found the child Giotto among the sheep-folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone. The master recognised his talent, and took him from his father's cottage to the Florentine bottega, much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and comprehensive intellect, capable of sustained labour, and devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good craftsman to his art, Giotto in the course of his long career filled Italy with work that taught succeeding centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where he adorned the convent of S. Chiara, we meet with Giotto in almost every city. The "Passion of our Lord" and the "Allegories of S. Francis" were painted by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Borne still shows his mosaic of the "Ship of the Church." Florence raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among campanili, to the sky; and preserves two chapels of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the chapel of the Podest
Antonio's father having died when the child was but three years old, his grandfather, Pisano, hoped that he would succeed him as village stonecutter and sculptor. Delicate though the little fellow had been from birth, at nine years of age he was laboring, as far as his strength would permit, in Pisano's workshop.
This, with Plates X. and XII., will give a sufficiently clear conception to any reader who has a knowledge of sculpture, of the principles of Giovanni Pisano's design.
A comparison of style no doubt renders this view plausible; for the lunette at Lucca is superior to any other of Pisano's works as a composition. The full discussion of these points is rendered impossible by the want of contemporary information, and each student must, therefore, remain contented with his own hypothesis.
Yet something can be said with regard to the Ravello pulpit that plays so important a part in the argument of the learned historians of Italian painting. Unless a strong similarity between it and Pisano's pulpits can be proved, their hypothesis carries with it no persuasion. The pulpit in the cathedral of Ravello is formed like an ambo of the antique type.
Centuries contributed to make the Ducal Palace what it is. The massive colonnades and Gothic loggias of the external basement date from the thirteenth century; their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccola Pisano's genius was in the ascendant.
Mark's with Niccola Pisano's, calling the one an evangelical-preacher lion, and the other a real, and naturally affectionate, lioness. And the one I showed you as Byzantine, the other as Gothic. So that I thus called the Greek art pious, and the Gothic profane.
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