to completion the Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.[67]
While engaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed
a body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders,
mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a guild
from the chief cities of Tuscany. It cannot be
proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called,
were among their number. Lacking evidence to
the contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit
of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried
out in obedience to his general plan. As the
church of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the
history of painting, by concentrating the genius of
Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of
Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa,
marked a point in the history of sculpture. It
would be difficult to find elsewhere even separate
works of greater force and beauty belonging to this,
the first or architectural, period of Italian sculpture;
and nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief
been set forth with method more earnest and with vigour
more sustained.[68] The subjects selected by these
unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble, are
in many instances the same as those afterwards painted
in fresco by Michael Angelo and Raphael at Borne.
Their treatment, for example, of the creation of Adam
and Eve, adopted in all probability from still earlier
and ruder workmen, after being refined by the improvements
of successive generations, may still be observed in
the triumphs of the Sistine Chapel and the Loggie.[69]
It was the practice of Italian artists not to seek
originality by diverging from the traditional modes
of presentation, but to prove their mastery by rendering
these as perfect and effective as the maturity of
art could make them. For the Italians, as before
them for the Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown,
in all cases where it was possible to improve upon
the invention of less fortunate predecessors.
The student of art may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure
of tracing sculpturesque or pictorial motives from
their genesis in some rude fragment to their final
development in the master-works of a Lionardo or a
Raphael, where scientific grouping of figures, higher
idealisation of style, the suggestion of freer movement,
and more varied dramatic expression yield at last
the full flower that the simple germ enfolded.
Among the most distinguished scholars of Niccola Pisano’s tradition must now be mentioned Andrea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried the manner of his master to Florence, and helped to fulfil the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the facade of S. Maria del Fiore; and in the first gate of the Baptistery, he bequeathed a model of bas-relief in bronze, which largely influenced the style of masters in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the