racter they represent, which is appended to them by
inscriptions,--their relative importance, even, indicated only by size,
more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no
attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world
they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain,
condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.

The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though
most noticeable in Painting. An interest in the actual world seems never
so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to
the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant
days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in
Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional
types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,--while in the
bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in
excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.

It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the
antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus,
said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece.
But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late
Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but
only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In
the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same
short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the
same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken
by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But
by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern
cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the
thirteenth.

In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno,
usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto
Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of
the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique
served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole
intent is different,--all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by
a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have
a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently
against his will by