idyll.  Here the whole force of Giovanni’s eminently dramatic genius comes into full play.  Not only has he treated the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects.  Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head.  In the “Adoration of the Magi,” again, Giovanni shows originality by the double action he has chosen to develop.  On one side the kings are sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star.  On the other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna.  It will be gathered even from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the ideal of Graeco-Roman sculpture.  He effected a fusion between the grand style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern imagination.  It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.

The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this pulpit.  At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels, whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher.  The most beautiful groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged youth standing above a winged lion and bull.  These groups separate the several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the pulpit.  Beneath, on capital’s of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls, each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the spandrils of the arches.  Thus every portion of this master-work is crowded with figures—­some detached, some executed in relief; and yet, amid so great a multitude, the eye is not confused; the total effect is nowhere dissipated.  The whole seems governed by one constructive thought, projected as a perfect unity of composition.[63]

A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit executed for the cathedral of Pisa, now unfortunately broken up.  An interesting fragment, one of the supporting columns of the octagon which formed the body of this structure, still exists in the museum of the Campo Santo.  It is an allegorical statue of Pisa.  The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned woman, suckling children at her breast, and standing on a pedestal supported by the eagle of the Empire.  She wears a girdle of rope seven times knotted, to betoken the rule of Pisa over seven subject islands.  At the four corners of her throne stand the four human virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, distinguished less by beauty of shape than by determined energy of symbolism.  Temperance is a naked woman, with hair twisted in the knots and curls of a Greek