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Updated: June 20, 2025
The northern gates are by Ghiberti, and, like those of Pisano, are divided into twenty compartments, the subject being the life of Christ. The bronze door-posts are delicately carved with flowers, fruit, and animals. These gates were first placed on the eastern side, but in 1452 were removed to make room for Ghiberti's still finer work.
That such statues were known in Italy is proved not only by their presence in this museum, but by the ivory Madonna of Giovanni Pisano in the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa. The Marzocco which stood of old on the Ringhiera before the Palazzo Vecchio might seem to be a work of this period, for it is only saved by a kind of good fortune from failure.
It is in Pistoja better almost than anywhere else in Italy that these early sculptors men who were at work here before Niccolò Pisano came from Apulia may be studied. Rude enough as we may think, they are yet in their subtle beauty, if we will but look at them, the marvellous product of a time which many have thought altogether barbarous.
Niccolò Pisano was from Apulia. He may well have seen the beautiful fragments of Greek and Roman art scattered over the South before he came to Pisa, yet there may, too, be more truth in Vasari's tale than we are sometimes willing to admit, so that in the northern city beside Arno it may well have been with a sort of delight he came upon the art of the ancients, asleep in the beautiful Campo Santo of Pisa, and awakened it, yes, almost with a kiss.
Almost at once on your right you pass S. Michele in Borgo, built probably just before his death by Fra Guglielmo, that disciple of Niccolò Pisano. Fra Guglielmo died in the convent of S. Caterina, for he had been fifty-seven years in the Dominican Order.
If the Roman law still lived as tradition and custom in the hearts of men, the statues of the gods were but hiding for a little time in Latin earth. It was Niccolò Pisano who first brought them forth.
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 conclusion, then, we arrive at, must arrive at; the fact being irrevocably so: that in order to give your imagination and the other powers of your souls full play, you must do as all the great architects of old time did you must yourselves be your sculptors. Phidias, Michael Angelo, Orcagna, Pisano, Giotto, which of these men, do you think, could not use his chisel?
The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy. Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano.
Niccolo Pisano appears to have been the first who, at Pisa, took the right way in sculpture: his groups, still in existence, are sometimes too crowded; his figures badly designed, and the whole defective in sentiment; but he gave an impulse communicated through the antique to composition, not unperceived by his scholars, who saw with his eyes and wrought with his spirit.
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