the painters make. In one respect fortune was favourable to the
labours of Andrea, because there had been brought to Pisa, as it has
been said elsewhere, by means of the many victories that the Pisans had
at sea, many antiquities and sarcophagi that are still round the Duomo
and the Campo Santo, and these brought him such great assistance and
gave him such great light as could not be obtained by Giotto, for the
reason that the ancient paintings had not been preserved as much as the
sculptures. And although statues are often destroyed by fires and by the
ruin and fury of war, and buried or transported to diverse places,
nevertheless it is easy for the experienced to recognize the difference
in the manner of all countries; as, for example, the Egyptian is slender
and lengthy in its figures, the Greek is scientific and shows much study
in the nudes, while the heads have almost all the same expression, and
the most ancient Tuscan is laboured in the hair and somewhat uncouth.
That of the Romans (I call Romans, for the most part, those who, after
the subjugation of Greece, betook themselves to Rome, whither all that
there was of the good and of the beautiful in the world was
carried)--that, I say, is so beautiful, by reason of the expressions,
the attitudes, and the movements both of the nude and of the draped
figures, that it may be said that they wrested the beautiful from all
the other provinces and moulded it into one single manner, to the end
that it might be, as it is, the best--nay, the most divine of all.

All these beautiful manners and arts being spent in the time of Andrea,
that alone was in use which had been brought by the Goths and by the
uncivilized Greeks into Tuscany. Wherefore he, having studied the new
method of design of Giotto and those few antiquities that were known to
him, refined in great part the grossness of so miserable a manner with
his judgment, in such wise that he began to work better and to give much
greater beauty to statuary than any other had yet done in that art up to
his times. Therefore, his genius and his good skill and dexterity
becoming known, he was assisted by many in his country, and while still
young he was commissioned to make for S. Maria a Ponte some little
figures in marble, which brought him so good a name that he was sought
out with very great insistence to come to work in Florence for the
Office of Works of S. Maria del Fiore, which, after a beginning had been
made with the