to women whose eyes were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete.  Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the portals of S. Peter’s, when Raphael should mingle a carnival of more than pagan sensuality with Bible subjects in Leo’s Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta should place the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in marble at the feet of Paul III. upon his sepulchre.[61]

Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit.  They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation or to paralyse inventive impulse.  The thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first modern artist were not Greek.  This in itself saved him from that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later neo-pagan sculptors.  Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and established standards of successful treatment.  For the rest, his choice of form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to native Tuscan models.  If nothing of his handiwork were left but the bas-relief of the “Inferno” on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point.  It remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim of a real artist.  And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art.  Niccola is more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some of his immediate successors.  The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of his genius.  So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman’s pulpit that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its preservation—­much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned to the care of the Phaidruntai.

Niccola Pisano founded a school.  His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia, carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad through Italy.  Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa, the facade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine of S. Donato at Arezzo—­four of the purest works of Gothic art in Italy—­showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors.  We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni’s work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of the antique, and curiously blended with the general characteristics