he mastery over plastic form, and the detached allegorical figures--are
noticeable only by their total absence from it. What is left by way of
similarity is a sculpturesque refinement in Sigelgaita's portrait, not
unworthy of Pisano's own chisel. This, however, is but a slender point
whereon to base so large a pyramid of pure conjecture. Surely we must look
elsewhere than at Ravello or at Foggia for the origin of Niccola Pisano.

Why then should we reject tradition in this instance? Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle reply; because the sculpture of no Tuscan city before his
period is good enough to have led up to him. Yet this may be contested;
and at all events it will not be easy to prove from the Ravello head of
Sigelgaita that a more advanced school existed in the south. The fact is
that the art of the stone-carvers or _marmorarii_ had never entirely died
out since the days of Roman greatness; nor was Niccola without respectable
predecessors in the very town of Lucca, where he produced the first
masterpiece of modern sculpture. The circular font of S. Frediano, for
example, carved with figures in high relief by a certain Robertus of the
twelfth century, combines the Romanesque mannerism with the _naivete_ of
mediaeval fancy. I might point in particular to two knights seated on one
horse in what I take to be the company of Pharaoh crossing the Red Sea, as
an instance of a successful attempt to escape from the formalism of a
decayed style. At the same time the general effect of the embossed work of
this font is fine; nor do we fail to perceive that the artist retained
some portion of the classic feeling for grandiose and monumental
composition. Far less noteworthy, yet still not utterly despicable, is
the bas-relief of Biduinus over the side-door of S. Salvatore at Lucca.
What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to the style of these
continuators of a dead tradition, was feeling for the beauty of classical
work in a good age, and through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with
nature. It is just at this point that the old tale about the sarcophagus
of the Countess Beatrice conveys not only the letter but the spirit of the
fact. Niccola's genius, no less vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto,
infused into the hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors true
nature and true art. Between the bas-relief of S. Salvatore and the
bas-relief over the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, there is indeed a
broad gulf, y