technical excellence of Andrea’s bronze-work, would be difficult.  Many students will always be found to prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more florid manner of Ghiberti.[70] What we chiefly observe in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art of painting over his mode of conception and treatment.  If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea was attracted to its allegories; if Giovanni infused romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid classicism of his father, Andrea diverged upon another track of picturesque delineation.  A new sun had now arisen in the heavens of art.  This was the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, brought the Italians to a true sense of their aesthetical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the elder and more technically finished craft of the stone-carver.  Sculpture, which in the school of Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architecture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands of Andrea.

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accomplished.  In order to embody the ideas of Christianity, art had to think more of expression than of pure form.  Expression is the special sphere of painting; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the mistress of her own domain.  On the deeper reasons for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have dwelt already, while showing that a large class of subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the artist by Christianity.[71] Humility and charity may be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age; nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a voluptuous queen of love.  Italian sculpture abandoned the presentation of the naked human body as useless.  The emotions written on the face became of more importance than the modelling of the limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the artist’s thought.  Andrea Pisano’s figure of Hope, raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, seems but a repetition of the motive expressed by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena chapel.[72] Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the movement of the body it clothed, was used by the Italian sculptors to conceal the limbs, and to enhance by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf some quality of the emotions.  The result was that sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carvers are chiefly bas-reliefs—­pictures in bronze or marble.[73]