CHAPTER III--SCULPTURE

In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her handmaid. Mediæval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century. It was Niccola Pisano, architect and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath of genius life into the dead forms of plastic art. From him we date the dawn of the æsthetical Renaissance with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of humanism; for he determined the direction not only of sculpture but also of painting in Italy. To quote the language of Lord Lindsay's panegyric: "Neither Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent and durability of influence; for whatever of highest excellence has been achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only but throughout Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in following up the principle which he first struck out."^[56] In truth, Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of combining the study of antiquity with the study of nature; and to him belongs the credit not merely of his own achievement, considerable as that may be, but also of the work of his immediate scholars and of all who learned from him to portray life. From Niccola Pisano onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we trace one genealogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art beyond the sphere of his invention, looked back to him as their progenitor. The man who first emancipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened a way for the attainment of true beauty, would by the Greeks have been honoured with a special cultas as the Hero Eponym of art. It remains for us after our own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.

The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information. Instead of accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjecture. In the absence of contemporary documents and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness. The Germans have been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration. Yet to resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty. Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial. Tradition may err about dates, details, and names. It is just here that antiquarian research can render valuable help. But there are occasions when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the higher criticism afford no surer basis for opinion. If in such cases a legend has been formed and recorded, the student will advance further toward comprehending the spirit of his subject by patiently considering what he knows to be in part perhaps a mythus, than by starting with the foregone conclusion that the legend must of necessity be worthless, and that his cunning will suffice to supply the missing clue.^[57]

Thus much I have said by way of preface to what follows upon Niccola Pisano. Almost all we know about him is derived from a couple of inscriptions, a few contracts, and his Life by Giorgio Vasari. It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions. Much of Niccola's biography reads like a legend in his pages—the popular and oral tradition of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous fidelity. A well-founded conviction of Vasari's frequent inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in question many hitherto accepted points about the nationality and training of Pisano. The discussion, of their arguments I leave for the appendix, contenting myself at present with relating so much of Vasari's legend as cannot, I think, reasonably be rejected.^[58]

Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, he was already a famous architect; and it must always be remembered that he and his school subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts. It was not until the year 1233, or 1237, according to different modern calculations, that he executed his first masterpiece in sculpture.^[59] This was a "Deposition from the Cross," in high relief, placed in a lunette over one of the side doors of S. Martino at Lucca. The noble forms of this group, the largeness of its style, the breadth of drapery and freedom of action it displays, but, above all, the unity of its design, proclaimed that a new era had begun for art. In order to appreciate the importance of this relief, it is only necessary to compare it with the processional treatment of similar subjects upon early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands up stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and combining artist's thought be traced in any effort after composition. Ever since the silver age of Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediæval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The façades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously with Niccola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North were adorning the façades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of loveliness.^[60] Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not arisen, and, except in Italy, the conditions were still wanting under which alone the plastic arts could attain to independence. A fresh start, at once conscious and scientific, was imperatively demanded. This new beginning sculpture took in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from the bye-paths of his predecessors to the free field of nature, and who learned precious lessons from the fragments of classical sculpture existing in his native town. As though to prove the essential dependence of the modern revival upon the recovery of antique culture, we find that his genius, in spite of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian bias, required the confirmation which could only be derived from Græco-Roman precedent. In the Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a sarcophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and Phædra, where once reposed the dust of Beatrice, the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this bas-relief, Niccola rediscovered the right way of art—not by merely copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style. His work at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, while he could not wholly free himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed by his choice of short and square-set types, he nevertheless learned from the antique how to aim at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the living human form. A marble vase, sculptured with Indian Bacchus and his train of Mænads, gave him further help. From these grave or graceful classic forms, satisfied with their own goodliness, and void of inner symbolism, the Christian sculptor drank the inspiration of Renaissance art. In the "Adoration of the Magi," carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the "Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man—Hercules or Fortitude—upon a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And yet they still remained antagonistic—fused externally by art, but severed in the consciousness that, during those strange years of dubious impulse, felt the might of both. Monks leaning from Pisano's pulpit preached the sinfulness of natural pleasure to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete. Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the portals of S. Peter's, when Raphael should mingle a carnival of more than pagan sensuality with Bible subjects in Leo's Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta should place the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in marble at the feet of Paul III. upon his sepulchre.^[61]

Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit. They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved him from that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later neo-pagan sculptors. Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim of a real artist. And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Niccola is more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some of his immediate successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman's pulpit that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its preservation—much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned to the care of the Phaidruntai.

Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia, carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad through Italy. Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa, the façade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine of S. Donato at Arezzo—four of the purest works of Gothic art in Italy—showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors. We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of the antique, and curiously blended with the general characteristics of the Pisan school. In spite of the Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his pulpits, the spirit of his work remained classical. The young Hercules holding the lion's cub in his right hand upon his shoulder, while with his left he tames the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a return to Latin style. The same sympathy with the past is observable in the self-restraint and comparative coldness of the bas-reliefs at Pisa. The Junonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of Simeon, the ponderous folding of the drapery, and the massive carriage of the neck throughout, denote an effort to revivify an antique manner. What, therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a classical revival in the very depth of the Middle Ages. The case is different with his son Giovanni. Profiting by the labours of his father, and following in his footsteps, he carried the new art into another region, and brought a genius of more picturesque and forcible temper into play. The value of this new direction given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, especially for painting, cannot be exaggerated. Without Giovanni's intervention, the achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that mediæval effort after the Renaissance, was in architecture.^[62]

The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by Niccola, is used with sympathy and freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S. Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph of Italian Gothic sculpture. The superiority of that complex and consummate work of plastic art over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the most important qualities of style and composition, can scarcely be called in question. Its only serious fault is an exaggeration of the height of the pillars in proportion to the size of the hexagon they support. Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for balanced masses it displays. The five subjects chosen by Giovanni for his bas-reliefs are the "Nativity," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Massacre of the Innocents," the "Crucifixion," and the "Last Judgment." In the "Nativity" our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola's conception, but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of childbirth. 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 "Massacre of the Innocents," compared with this relief, is a tragedy beside an idyll. Here the whole force of Giovanni's eminently dramatic genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects. Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head. In the "Adoration of the Magi," again, Giovanni shows originality by the double action he has chosen to develop. On one side the kings are sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the ideal of Græco-Roman sculpture. He effected a fusion between the grand style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern imagination. It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.

The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this pulpit. At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels, whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The most beautiful groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged youth standing above a winged lion and bull. These groups separate the several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the pulpit. Beneath, on capital's of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls, each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the spandrils of the arches. Thus every portion of this master-work is crowded with figures—some detached, some executed in relief; and yet, amid so great a multitude, the eye is not confused; the total effect is nowhere dissipated. The whole seems governed by one constructive thought, projected as a perfect unity of composition.^[63]

A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit executed for the cathedral of Pisa, now unfortunately broken up. An interesting fragment, one of the supporting columns of the octagon which formed the body of this structure, still exists in the museum of the Campo Santo. It is an allegorical statue of Pisa. The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned woman, suckling children at her breast, and standing on a pedestal supported by the eagle of the Empire. She wears a girdle of rope seven times knotted, to betoken the rule of Pisa over seven subject islands. At the four corners of her throne stand the four human virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, distinguished less by beauty of shape than by determined energy of symbolism. Temperance is a naked woman, with hair twisted in the knots and curls of a Greek Aphrodite. Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with massive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales. Throughout this group there is no attempt to realise forms pleasing to the eye; the sculptor has aimed at suggesting to the mind as many points of intellectual significance as possible. In spite of ugliness and hardness, the "Allegory of Pisa" commands respect by vigour of conception, and rivets attention by force of execution.

A more popular and pleasing monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.^[64] At his head and feet stand angels drawing back the curtains that would else have shrouded this last slumber of a good man from the eyes of the living.^[65] A contrast is thus established between the repose of the dead and the ever-watchful activity of celestial ministers. Sleep so guarded, the sculptor seeks to tell us, must have glorious waking; and when those hands unfold upon the Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of the attendant angels will break into smiles and singing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he served in life.

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the façade of the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain. Vasari asserts that Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world to the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric. 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.^[66] Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano. His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is unmistakable at Orvieto: but in the absence of direct information, we are left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.

When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or taglia-pietri, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed by a rector and three chamberlains. Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accordingly it seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous workmen arose who combined this art with that of building. The chief of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.^[67] While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, were among their number. Lacking evidence to the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried out in obedience to his general plan. As the church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the history of painting, by concentrating the genius of Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would be difficult to find elsewhere even separate works of greater force and beauty belonging to this, the first or architectural, period of Italian sculpture; and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been set forth with method more earnest and with vigour more sustained.^[68] The subjects selected by these unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble, are in many instances the same as those afterwards painted in fresco by Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne. Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements of successive generations, may still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.^[69] It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek originality by diverging from the traditional modes of presentation, but to prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect and effective as the maturity of art could make them. For the Italians, as before them for the Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases where it was possible to improve upon the invention of less fortunate predecessors. The student of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing sculpturesque or pictorial motives from their genesis in some rude fragment to their final development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where scientific grouping of figures, higher idealisation of style, the suggestion of freer movement, and more varied dramatic expression yield at last the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.

Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano's tradition must now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the façade of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the technical excellence of Andrea's bronze-work, would be difficult. Many students will always be found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner of Ghiberti.^[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and treatment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque delineation. A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to a true sense of their æsthetical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands of Andrea.

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accomplished. In order to embody the ideas of Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form. Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her own domain. On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.^[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless. The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.^[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions. The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs—pictures in bronze or marble.^[73]

In a like degree, though not for the same reason, sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architecture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism of the full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic statues, destined to take their places—not in churches, but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not far to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been erected for the god, and the statue dwelt within the cella like a master in his house. Christianity forbade an image of the living God; consequently the Church had another object than to roof the statue of a deity. It was the meeting-place of a congregation bent on worshipping Him who dwells not in houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The vast spaces and aërial arcades of mediæval architecture had their meaning in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen power. It followed of necessity that the carved work destined to decorate a Christian temple could never be the main feature of the building. It existed for the Church, and not the Church for it.^[74]

Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola was extended to Venice. There is reason to believe that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal Palace. Venice, however, invariably exercised her own controlling influence over the arts of aliens; so we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane treatment in these splendid carvings than in aught produced by Pisan workmen for their native towns of Tuscany.

Nino, the sculptor of the "Madonna della Rosa," the chief ornament of the Spina chapel, and Tommaso, both sons of Andrea da Pontadera, together with Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the traditions of the school founded by Niccola. Balduccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved the shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of S. Eustorgio, and impressed his style on Matteo da Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augustine at Pavia.^[75] These facts, though briefly stated, are not without significance. Travellers who have visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after studying the shrine, or arca as Italians call it, of S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona.^[76]

The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine—the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man, like the more illustrious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting glory. He studied the goldsmith's craft under his father, Cione, passing the years of his apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the technical details of an industry that then supplied the strictest method of design. With his brother, Bernardo, he practised painting. Like Giotto, he was no mean poet;^[77] and like all the higher craftsmen of his age, he was an architect. Though the church of Orsammichele owes its present form to Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as capo maëstro after Gaddi's death, completed the structure; and though the Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers upon architecture, is now known to be the work of Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna's Loggia del Bigallo, more modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, proved by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall have to speak hereafter. As a sculptor he is best known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built to enshrine the picture of the Madonna by Ugolino da Siena.^[78]

In this monument Orcagna employed carved bas-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, incrustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass patterns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor arts of mediæval Italy. The subordination of sculpture to architectural effect is noticeable; and the Giottesque influence appears even more strongly here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This influence Orcagna received indirectly through his master in stone carving; it formed, indeed, the motive force of figurative art during his lifetime. The subjects of the "Annunciation," the "Nativity," the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Adoration of the Three Kings," framed in octagonal mouldings at the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in allegorical conception but also in choice of type and treatment of drapery.

While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practised as an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained in delicacy of execution, accuracy of modelling, and precision of design by their apprenticeship to the goldsmith's trade, was hardly perhaps sufficient to compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It was difficult, we fancy, for men so educated to conceive the higher purposes of sculpture. Contented with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, they failed to attain to such independence of treatment as may be reached by sculptors who do not carry to their work the preconceptions of a narrower handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft to form a monumental jewel.^[79]

The façade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed the transition to the second period. To find one characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth century is not easy, since it was marked by many distinct peculiarities. If, however, we choose to call it pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of some eminent masters, and keep in view the supremacy of painting at this epoch. A great public enterprise at Florence brings together in honourable rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and marks the advent of the Renaissance. When the Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti, decided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare designs for competition. Their call was answered by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, and by two other Tuscan artists of less note. The young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs submitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine Baptistery.^[80] Giacomo della Quercia was excluded from the competition at an early stage; but the umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, until the latter, with notable generosity, feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 1403, Ghiberti received the commission for the first of the two remaining gates. He afterwards obtained the second; and as they were not finished until 1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon them. He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden florins for his labour and the cost of the material employed.

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.^[81] Their subject is the "Sacrifice of Isaac;" and a comparison of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. The faults of Brunelleschi's model are want of repose and absence of composition. Abraham rushes in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, reaching forth one hand to show the ram to Abraham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the other. The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose with his near hind leg; one of the servants is taking a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup from the stream at which the ass is drinking. Thus each figure has a separate uneasy action. Those critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-century sculpture was due to changes in artistic and religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance, would do well to examine this plate, and see how much account must be taken of the artist's temperament in forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its commencement; but the too fervid quality of his character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmonious nature into his composition. The angel leans from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated quietly and out of sight of the main actors. Isaac kneels in the attitude of a submissive victim, though his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of pinions through the air; while Abraham has but just lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as a possibility by the naked knife. The two servants are grouped below in conversation, one on each side of the browsing ass. This power of telling a story plainly, but without dramatic vehemence; of eliminating the painful details of the subject, and combining its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked him as an artist distinguished by good taste.

How Delia Quercia treated the "Sacrifice of Isaac" we do not know. His bas-reliefs upon the façade of S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti in the handling of a subject common to both, the "Creation of Eve."^[82] There is no doubt but that Della Quercia was a formidable rival. Had the gates of the Baptistery been entrusted to his execution, we might have possessed a masterpiece of more heroic style. While smoothness and an almost voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti's naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Della Quercia's group, by the concentration of robust and rugged power, anticipates the style of Michael Angelo. Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant angels. Della Quercia, in obedience to the stricter laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the three chief persons, and brings them into close connection. While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful and highly studied attitude, Eve has just stepped forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve and her Creator. The robe, again, in its voluminous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of the Deity, convey an effect of heaviness rather than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying this composition, that it is a noble and original attempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplishment. Without this antecedent sketch, Michael Angelo might not have matured the most complete of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The similarity between Delia Quercia's bas-relief and Buonarroti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The young Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent hours of study before the sculptures of S. Petronio; so that this seed of Della Quercia's sowing bore after many years the fruit of world-renowned achievement in Rome.

Two other memorable works of Della Quercia must be parenthetically mentioned. These are the Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now unhappily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Carretto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca. The latter has long been dear to English students of Italian art through words inimitable for their strength of sympathetic criticism.^[83]

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent much of his leisure in modelling portraits and casting imitations of antique gems and coins for his friends. At the same time he practised painting. We find him employed in decorating a palace at Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather recalled him to Florence, in order that he might compete for the gate of the Baptistery. It is probable that from this early training Ghiberti derived the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution that are reckoned among the chief merits of his work. He also developed a manner more pictorial than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua Reynolds remarked, "Ghiberti's landscape and buildings occupied so large a portion of the compartments, that the figures remained but secondary objects,"^[84] his criticism might fairly have been taxed with some injustice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a truth important for the understanding of this period of Italian art.

The first gate may be cited as the supreme achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime. In the second, by the introduction of elaborate landscapes and the massing together of figures arranged in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances, Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculpture from painting. Having learned perspective from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new science to his own craft, not discerning that it has no place in noble bas-relief. He therefore abandoned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped together without accessories. Instead of painting frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole compositions that might have been expressed with propriety in colour. The point of Sir Joshua's criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti's practice of distributing figures on a small scale in spacious landscape framework was at variance with the severity of sculptural treatment. The pernicious effect of his example may be traced in much Florentine work of the mid Renaissance period which passed for supremely clever when it was produced. What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not merely pardonable but even admirable, became under other hands no less repulsive than the transference of pictorial effects to painted glass.^[85]