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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



that manner that he could, before ever he had had 

 the chance of building one in real marble. Then 

 at last, after those busy years in which, with color 

 spread over many a chapel and chamber wall, he 

 had given an expression the most just, grave, and 

 simple to the great thoughts of which the time 

 was full, he was called back with honor to his na- 

 tive city, and appointed over a work in which he 

 could realize, and more than realize, all those 

 building-dreams of his youth. He enters upon 

 the inheritance of Arnolfo ; he takes up Arnolfo's 

 art of rich surface incrustation or inlay, and per- 

 fects it with a hundred new and lovelier delicacies 

 of design; he builds this mighty tower at whose 

 summoning clang the people shall flock for ever- 

 more to worship and to festival ; he builds it four- 

 square, plumb from plinth to cornice, and flanked 

 at the four angles with four aery piers ; he divides 

 it into bands of subtilest proportion ; he pierces 

 each division with exquisite variety of tracery ; he 

 panels the snow-white marble with fair geometries 

 of color and dark; he incrusts this tower of his 

 building with living stars and flowers and diamonds 

 of stone ; he outdoes all dreaming, for the hearts 

 of a mighty people are in his heart, and in his 

 hands are the strength and cunning of all theirs 

 together. 



Of this tower, it is a particular part of the 

 sculptured decorations which we are now to ex- 

 amine in detail. That the stamp of Giotto's in- 

 vention is upon the scheme there is no doubt, but 

 whether he himself turned sculptor in his old age, 

 and actually wrought upon the marble, we cannot 

 tell. The time between his appointment to the 

 cathedral works and his death was only two years, 

 and must have been too multifariously filled, one 

 would say, to leave him time for such exertion. 

 Tradition is uncertain on the point. Vasari says, 

 in one place : " If that is true which Lorenzo 

 Ghiberti left written — and I for one hold it to be 

 most true — Giotto not only made the design for 

 this bell-tower, but also sculptured part of those 

 stories in marble in which are represented the be- 

 ginnings of all the arts." In another place, the 

 same Vasari says of Andrea Pisano : " What is 

 more, he made, after the design of Giotto, those 

 little figures of marble which stand for a finish to 

 the doorway of the campanile of Santa Maria del 

 Fiore ; and round about the said campanile, in 

 certain lozenges, the seven planets, the seven vir- 

 tues, the seven works of mercy" (and six, Vasari 

 should have added, out of the seven sacraments) 

 — " small figures in half-relief, which were great- 

 ly praised in their day." The probability is that 

 Giotto before his death gave the general plan of 



these decorations, and that Andrea Pisano was 

 the sculptor charged to superintend their execu- 

 tion. Andrea da Pontedera, called Andrea Pisano, 

 was the greatest and most complete master of the 

 earlier school of Tuscan sculpture. That school 

 has its rise in the middle of the thirteenth cen- 

 tury with Nicholas of Pisa, who, from a study of 

 the sculptures on ancient sarcophagi, and perhaps 

 from other sources of discipline of which we can- 

 not recover the history, revived much of the tech- 

 nical excellence of the old Roman school. Only 

 he did not revive the old classic gift of grouping 

 the figures of a composition so that they should 

 fill the given space agreeably, and stand in clear, 

 distinct, natural relations with one another. The 

 figures in his reliefs, taken singly, are often well 

 proportioned and skillfully wrought, but crowded 

 and jumbled together with rude awkwardness and 

 confusion. John of Pisa, the son of Nicholas, 

 was a still greater sculptor than his father, and 

 great especially in his power of dramatic expres- 

 sion, and in the thoughtful invention of allegori- 

 cal symbols and personifications. The same ex- 

 pressive power and hold upon the facts of life, 

 the same justness and force of imagination, also 

 formed part of the greatness of the painter Giotto, 

 who was younger than John of Pisa by some thirty 

 years. But Giotto had another greatness of his 

 own ; in his paintings he revived perfectly that 

 ancient art of clear and noble distribution, of 

 placing his figures at right intervals and in right 

 and expressive relations with one another. And 

 this art he seems to have imparted to his con- 

 temporary Andrea, called Andrea the Pisan be- 

 cause he was at first the pupil of John of Pisa. 

 Andrea the Pisan is the first Tuscan sculptor who 

 reaches central excellence in his art. To more 

 than the technical skill of Nicholas he unites all 

 the dramatic and all the imaginative power of 

 John, and all Giotto's noble arrangement and 

 simple directness in telling a story. The most 

 famous work of Andrea, and that which cost him 

 most labor, was the bronze gate which he wrought 

 for the Baptistery of Florence ; on it were repre- 

 sented allegorical figures, and scenes from the 

 life of St. John the Baptist. This is the earliest 

 of the three celebrated bronze gates of the Bap- 

 tistery, The other two, done by Ghiberti a hun- 

 dred years later, have been far more praised, but 

 the truth is that Ghiberti tried to go beyond the 

 necessary limitations of sculpture, and that, in 

 spite of the extreme grace and accomplishment of 

 his work, that of Andrea is the better conceived, 

 the purer and more really classical, of the two. 

 When people talk of classical art, they are too 



