custom in the hearts of men, the statues of the gods were but hiding for
a little time in Latin earth. It was Niccolo Pisano who first brought
them forth.

The pulpit which he made for Pisa--perhaps his earliest work--is in the
form of a hexagon resting upon nine columns; the central pillar is set
on a strange group, a man, a griffin, and animals; three others are
poised on the backs of lions; while three are set on simple pediments on
the ground; and three again support the steps. A "trefoil arch" connects
the six chief pillars, on each of which stands a statue of a Virtue. It
is here that we came for the first time upon a figure not of the
Christian world, for Fortitude is represented as Hercules with a lion's
cub on his shoulder. In the spandrels of the trefoils are the four
Evangelists and six Prophets. Above the Virtues rise pillars clustered
in threes, framing the five bas-reliefs and supporting the parapet of
the pulpit; and it is here, by these the most beautiful and
extraordinary works of that age in Italy, that Niccolo Pisano will be
for ever remembered.

Poor in composition though they be, they are full of marvellous energy,
a Roman dignity and weight. It is antiquity flowering again in a
Christian soil, with a certain new radiance and sweetness about it, a
naivete almost ascetic, that was certainly impossible from any Roman
hand.

On the far side you may see the Birth of Our Lord, where Mary sits in
the midst, enthroned, unmoved, with all the serenity of a goddess, while
in another part the angel brings her the message with the gesture of an
orator. Consider, then, those horses' heads in the Adoration of the
Magi, or the high priest in the Presentation, and then compare them with
the rude work of Bonannus on the south transept door of the Duomo; no
Pisan, certainly no Tuscan, could have carved them thus in high relief
with the very splendour of old Rome in every line. And in the
Crucifixion you see Christ really for the first time as a God reigning
from the cross; while Madonna, fallen at last, is not the weeping Mary
of the Christians, but the mother of the Gracchi who has lost her elder
son. In the Last Judgment it is a splendid God you see among a crowd of
men with heads like the busts in a Roman gallery, with all the aloofness
and dignity of those weary emperors. There is almost nothing here of any
natural life observed for the first time, and but little of the
Christian asceticism so marvellously lo