Tradition may err about dates, details, and names.  It is just here that antiquarian research can render valuable help.  But there are occasions when the perusal of documents and the exercise of what is called the higher criticism afford no surer basis for opinion.  If in such cases a legend has been formed and recorded, the student will advance further toward comprehending the spirit of his subject by patiently considering what he knows to be in part perhaps a mythus, than by starting with the foregone conclusion that the legend must of necessity be worthless, and that his cunning will suffice to supply the missing clue.[57]

Thus much I have said by way of preface to what follows upon Niccola Pisano.  Almost all we know about him is derived from a couple of inscriptions, a few contracts, and his Life by Giorgio Vasari.  It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions.  Much of Niccola’s biography reads like a legend in his pages—­the popular and oral tradition of a great man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous fidelity.  A well-founded conviction of Vasari’s frequent inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in question many hitherto accepted points about the nationality and training of Pisano.  The discussion, of their arguments I leave for the appendix, contenting myself at present with relating so much of Vasari’s legend as cannot, I think, reasonably be rejected.[58]

Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, he was already a famous architect; and it must always be remembered that he and his school subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts.  It was not until the year 1233, or 1237, according to different modern calculations, that he executed his first masterpiece in sculpture.[59] This was a “Deposition from the Cross,” in high relief, placed in a lunette over one of the side doors of S. Martino at Lucca.  The noble forms of this group, the largeness of its style, the breadth of drapery and freedom of action it displays, but, above all, the unity of its design, proclaimed that a new era had begun for art.  In order to appreciate the importance of this relief, it is only necessary to compare it with the processional treatment of similar subjects upon early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands up stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and combining artist’s thought be traced in any effort after composition.  Ever since the silver age of Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty gave a final impulse to the Genius of Greece, sculpture had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines.  The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past.  It is true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval