Aphrodite.  Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with massive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales.  Throughout this group there is no attempt to realise forms pleasing to the eye; the sculptor has aimed at suggesting to the mind as many points of intellectual significance as possible.  In spite of ugliness and hardness, the “Allegory of Pisa” commands respect by vigour of conception, and rivets attention by force of execution.

A more popular and pleasing monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia.  The Pope, whose life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.[64] At his head and feet stand angels drawing back the curtains that would else have shrouded this last slumber of a good man from the eyes of the living.[65] A contrast is thus established between the repose of the dead and the ever-watchful activity of celestial ministers.  Sleep so guarded, the sculptor seeks to tell us, must have glorious waking; and when those hands unfold upon the Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of the attendant angels will break into smiles and singing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he served in life.

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the sculpture on the facade of the cathedral at Orvieto, is not known for certain.  Vasari asserts that Niccola and his pupils worked upon this series of bas-reliefs, setting forth the whole Biblical history and the cycle of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world to the last judgment.  Yet we know that Niccola himself died at least twelve years before the foundation of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric.  The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with regard to a monument of so large extent and vast importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.[66] Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano.  His manner, as continued and developed by his school, is unmistakable at Orvieto:  but in the absence of direct information, we are left to conjecture the conditions under which this, the closing if not the crowning achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture, was produced.

When the great founder of Italian art visited Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or taglia-pietri, in that city, numbering some sixty members, and governed by a rector and three chamberlains.  Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these craftsmen only sought to learn his method.  Accordingly it seems that a new impulse was given to sculpture in Siena; and famous workmen arose who combined this art with that of building.  The chief of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, having designed and carried