of the Pisan school.  In spite of the Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his pulpits, the spirit of his work remained classical.  The young Hercules holding the lion’s cub in his right hand upon his shoulder, while with his left he tames the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a return to Latin style.  The same sympathy with the past is observable in the self-restraint and comparative coldness of the bas-reliefs at Pisa.  The Junonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of Simeon, the ponderous folding of the drapery, and the massive carriage of the neck throughout, denote an effort to revivify an antique manner.  What, therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a classical revival in the very depth of the Middle Ages.  The case is different with his son Giovanni.  Profiting by the labours of his father, and following in his footsteps, he carried the new art into another region, and brought a genius of more picturesque and forcible temper into play.  The value of this new direction given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, especially for painting, cannot be exaggerated.  Without Giovanni’s intervention, the achievement of Niccola might possibly have been as unproductive of immediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that mediaeval effort after the Renaissance, was in architecture.[62]

The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by Niccola, is used with sympathy and freedom by his son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S. Andrea at Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph of Italian Gothic sculpture.  The superiority of that complex and consummate work of plastic art over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the most important qualities of style and composition, can scarcely be called in question.  Its only serious fault is an exaggeration of the height of the pillars in proportion to the size of the hexagon they support.  Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it combines bas-reliefs and detached statues, carved capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of marvellous invention; but it has no rival in the architectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling for balanced masses it displays.  The five subjects chosen by Giovanni for his bas-reliefs are the “Nativity,” the “Adoration of the Magi,” the “Massacre of the Innocents,” the “Crucifixion,” and the “Last Judgment.”  In the “Nativity” our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola’s conception, but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of childbirth.  Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan school—­for example, in the rough abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the facade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the same sense of beauty.  The “Massacre of the Innocents,” compared with this relief, is a tragedy beside an