begun
in 1153 by Diotisalvi, but the work went very slowly forward. In 1164,
out of 34,000 families in Pisa subject to taxes, each gave a gold sequin
for the continuation of the work, but it was not finished altogether
till the fourteenth century. There are four doors; above them on the
east and north are sculptures of the thirteenth century.[58]

Truly, one might as well try to describe the face of one's angel as
these holy places of Pisa, which are catalogued in every guide-book ever
written. At least I will withhold my hand from desecrating further that
which is still so lovely. Only, if you would hear the heavenly choirs
before death has his triumph over you, go by night into the Baptistery,
having bribed some choir-boy to sing for you, and you shall hear from
that marvellous roof a thousand angels singing round the feet of San
Raniero.

Perhaps the loveliest thing here is the great octagonal font of various
marbles, in which every Pisan child has been christened since 1157; but
it is the pulpit of Niccolo Pisano that everyone praises.

Niccolo Pisano appears to have been born in Apulia, and to have come to
Pisa about the middle of the thirteenth century. We know scarcely
anything of his life. The earliest record in which we find his name is
the contract of 1265, in which he binds himself to make a pulpit for the
Duomo of Siena.[59] There he is called _Magister Niccolus lapidum de
paroccia ecclesie Sancti Blasii de Ponte, de Pisis quondam Petri_.
Another document of later date describes him as _Magister Nichola Pietri
de Apulia_. Coming thus to Pisa from Apulia, possibly after many
wanderings, in about 1250, his childhood had been passed not among the
Tuscan hills, but in Southern Italy among the relics of the Roman world.
It is not any sudden revelation of Roman splendour he receives in the
Campo Santo of Pisa, but just a reminder, as it were, of the things of
his childhood, the broken statues of Rome that littered the country of
his birth. Thus in a moment this Southerner transforms the rude art of
his time here in Tuscany, the work of Bonannus, for instance, the
carvings of Biduinus, and the bas-reliefs at San Cassiano,[60] with the
faint memory of Rome that lingered like a ghost in the minds of men,
that already had risen in the laws and government of the cities, in the
desire of men here in Pisa, for instance, for liberty, and that was soon
to recreate the world. If the Roman law still lived as tradition and