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 mediaeval carvers had shown an instinct for the
beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The facades
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
facades 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 depen