Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/133

Rh P I S A N with Arnolfo del Cambio and other pupils, he developed and extended into other parts of Italy the renaissance of sculpture which in the main was due to the extraordinary talent of that distinguished artist. After he had spent the first part of his life at home as a pupil and fellow-worker of Niccola, the younger Pisano was summoned between 1270 and 1274 to Naples, where he worked for Charles of Anjou on the Castel Nuovo. One of his earliest independent performances was the Campo Santo at Pisa, finished about 1283 ; along with this he executed various pieces of sculp ture over the main door and inside the cloister. The richest in design of all his works (finished about 1286) is in the cathedral of Arezzo, a magnificent marble high altar and reredos, adorned both in front and at the back with countless figures and reliefs mostly illustrative of the lives of St Gregory and St Donate, whose bones are enshrined there. The actual execution of this was pro bably wholly the work of his pupils. In 1290 Giovanni was appointed architect or &quot; capo maestro &quot; of the new cathedral at Siena, in which office he succeeded Lorenzo Maitani, who went to Orvieto to build the less ambitious but equally magnificent duorno which had just been founded there. The design of the gorgeous facade of that duomo has been attributed to him, but it is more probable that he only carried out Maitani s design. , According to Vasari, Giovanni and other pupils of Niccola also executed the bas-reliefs on the west front of Orvieto, but this assertion is unsupported by any documentary evidence. At Perugia, Giovanni built the church of S. Domenico in 1304, but little of the original structure remains. The north transept, however, still contains his beautiful tomb of Benedict XL, with a sleeping figure of the pope, guarded by angels who draw aside the curtain (see woodcut). Part of the tomb of Benedict XI. , by Giovanni Pisatio. Above is a sculptured plinth supporting canopied figures of the Madonna and other saints. The whole composition is framed by a high cusped and gabled arch, on twisted columns, enriched with glass mosaic in the style of the Cosmati. The general design is like the earlier tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Orvieto, the work of Giovanni s fellow-pupil, Arnolfo del Cambio. One of Giovanni s most beautiful architectural works is the little chapel of S. Maria della Spina, on the banks of the Arno in Pisa; the actual execution of this gem-like chapel, and the sculpture with which it is adorned, was mostly the work of his pupils. 1 This exquisite little build ing has recently been pulled down and rebuilt, under the pretext of &quot; restoration.&quot; The influence of his father Niccola is seen strongly in all 1 See Schultz, Denkmalcr der Kunst in Unter-Ralien. vol. vii. p. 5. Giovanni s works, but especially in the pulpit of S. Andrea at Pistoia, executed about 1300. In design it resembles that in the Pisan baptistery ; but the reliefs are less severely classical, and more full of vivid dramatic power and complicated motives. Another pulpit, designed on the same lines, was made by him for the nave of Pisa cathedral between 1310 and 1311. Only fragments of this now exist, but it is in course of restoration. The last part of Giovanni s life was spent at Prato, near Florence, where with many pupils he worked at the cathedral till his death about 1330. PISANO, NICCOLA (c. 1206-1278), one of the chief sculptors and architects of mediaeval Italy, was born about 1206. Though he called himself Fisanus, from Pisa, where most of his life was spent, he was not a Pisan by birth. There are two distinct accounts of his parentage, both derived mainly from existing documents. According to one of these he is said to have been the son of &quot; Petrus, a notary of Siena ; &quot; but this statement is very doubtful, especially as the word &quot; Siena &quot; or &quot; de Senis &quot; appears to be a conjectural addition. Another document among the archives of the Sienese cathedral calls him son of &quot; Petrus de Apulia.&quot; Crowe and Cavalcaselle, as well as the majority of modern writers, accept the latter statement, and believe that he not only was a native of the province of Apulia in southern Italy, but also that he gained there his early instruction in the arts of sculpture and architec ture. Those on the other hand who, with most of the older writers, prefer to accept the theory of Niccola s origin being Tuscan suppose that he was a native of a small town called Apulia near Lucca. As is the case with the biographies of so many of those artists who lived long before Vasari s own time, that author s account of Niccola is quite untrustworthy. There is no doubt that in the century preceding Niccola Pisano s birth Apulia, and the southern provinces generally, were more advanced in the plastic art than any part of northern Italy witness especially the magnificent architecture and sculpture in I the cathedrals of Salerno, Bari, Amalfi, Eavello, and many others, in which still exist bronze doors, marble pulpits, and other works of art of great merit, dating from the llth and 12th centuries, a period when northern Italy produced very little art-work of any real beauty. That the young Niccola Pisano saw and was influenced by these things cannot be denied, but Crowe and Cavalcaselle, in their eagerness to contradict the old traditions, go very much too far when they deny the story, told by Vasari, of Niccola s admiration for and keen study of the remains of ancient Roman sculpture which were then beginning to be sought for and appreciated. In Niccola Pisano s works it is somewhat difficult to trace the direct influence of Apulian art, while in many of them, especially the panel-reliefs of his Pisan pulpit (see figure), classical feeling is apparent in every fold of the drapery, in the modelling of the nude, and in the dignified reserve of the main lines of the com position. For all that, Niccola was no dull copyist ; though he emancipated himself from the stiffness and unreality of earlier sculpture, yet his admiration and knowledge of the physical beauty of the human form in no way detracted from the purity and religious spirit of his subjects. Though pagan in their beauty of modelling and ^grace of attitude, his Madonnas are as worshipful, and his saints as saintly, as those of any sculptor the world has ever seen. With true genius he opened out to the church a new field in which all the gifts of God, even purely physical ones, were made use of and adopted as types and symbols of inward purity and love not repudiated and suppressed as snares of the evil one. Except through his works, but little is known of the history of Niccola s life. As early