carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention.  The facades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously with Niccola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North were adorning the facades and porches of cathedrals with statuary unrivalled in one style of loveliness.[60] Yet the founder of a line of progressive artists had not arisen, and, except in Italy, the conditions were still wanting under which alone the plastic arts could attain to independence.  A fresh start, at once conscious and scientific, was imperatively demanded.  This new beginning sculpture took in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from the bye-paths of his predecessors to the free field of nature, and who learned precious lessons from the fragments of classical sculpture existing in his native town.  As though to prove the essential dependence of the modern revival upon the recovery of antique culture, we find that his genius, in spite of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian bias, required the confirmation which could only be derived from Graeco-Roman precedent.  In the Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a sarcophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra, where once reposed the dust of Beatrice, the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of Tuscany.  Studying the heroic nudities and noble attitudes of this bas-relief, Niccola rediscovered the right way of art—­not by merely copying his model, but by divining the secret of the grand style.  His work at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, while he could not wholly free himself from the defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed by his choice of short and square-set types, he nevertheless learned from the antique how to aim at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the living human form.  A marble vase, sculptured with Indian Bacchus and his train of Maenads, gave him further help.  From these grave or graceful classic forms, satisfied with their own goodliness, and void of inner symbolism, the Christian sculptor drank the inspiration of Renaissance art.  In the “Adoration of the Magi,” carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus’ wife; while the high priest, in the “Circumcision,” displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus.  Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man—­Hercules or Fortitude—­upon a bracket of the same pulpit.  These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival.  The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other.  And yet they still remained antagonistic—­fused externally by art, but severed in the consciousness that, during those strange years of dubious impulse, felt the might of both.  Monks leaning from Pisano’s pulpit preached the sinfulness of natural pleasure