d over the
work of Antiquity almost like a caress. In these panels of the pulpit at
Pisa, where Madonna masquerades as Ariadne and the angel speaks with the
gesture of Hermes, some sentiment of a new sweetness in the world seems
to lurk amid all the naive classicism, finding expression at last in
such a thing, for instance, as the divine figure of Virtue in the pulpit
of the Duomo of Siena, in which some have thought to find French
influence, the work of the artists of Chartres and Rheims, visible
enough, one might think, in the work of Niccolo's son Giovanni Pisano,
whose ivory Statue of Madonna is to-day perhaps the greatest treasure of
the sacristy of the Duomo at Pisa.

Niccolo Pisano was from Apulia. He may well have seen the beautiful
fragments of Greek and Roman art scattered over the South before he came
to Pisa, yet there may, too, be more truth in Vasari's tale than we are
sometimes willing to admit, so that in the northern city beside Arno it
may well have been with a sort of delight he came upon the art of the
ancients, asleep in the beautiful Campo Santo of Pisa, and awakened it,
yes, almost with a kiss.

It is, however, in the work of his pupils Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo
Fiorentino[115] that Tuscan sculpture begins to throw off the yoke of
antiquity and to express itself. Fra Guglielmo, another pupil of
Niccolo's, in his work at Perugia more nearly preserves the manner of
his master, though always inferior to him in beauty and force: but in
the work of Arnolfo which remains to us chiefly in the tomb of Cardinal
de Braye in S. Domenico at Orvieto, and in the Tabernacle of S. Paolo
Fuori at Rome, and more especially in the work of Giovanni Pisano in the
pulpit for the Duomo of Pisa, now in the Museo, for instance, we may see
the beginnings of that new Tuscan sculpture which in Andrea Pisano and
Andrea Orcagna was to make the work of Nanni di Banco, of Ghiberti and
Donatello possible, and through them to inspire the art of all the
sculptors of the fifteenth century, that is to say of the Renaissance
itself.

Here in the Bargello it is chiefly that art of the fifteenth century
that we see in all its beauty and realism: and though for the proper
understanding of it some knowledge of its derivation might seem to be
necessary, a knowledge not to be had in the Museo itself, it is really a
new impulse in sculpture, different from, though maybe directed by, that
older art which we come upon, and may watch there