The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though most noticeable in Painting.  An interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture.  Even down to the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the “pleasant days” when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,—­while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.

It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece.  But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures.  In the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi.  Taken by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction.  But by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the thirteenth.

In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced.  The Inferno, usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc.  The antique served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole intent is different,—­all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by a different road.  In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it.  He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the possibilities of his material.  He must make his creatures alive to the last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,—­every feather is carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales.  That mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by natural rules, but by their relative importance,