high altar in 1786.  It is the work of Andrea di Puccio di Ognibene, the Pistojese goldsmith:  it was finished in 1316.  It is carved with fifteen stories from the New Testament, and with many statues of prophets and pictures of saints.  Of the two wings, that on the left, consisting of stories from the Old Testament, with the Nativity, the Presentation and the Marriage of the Virgin, is the work of Pietro of Florence—­it was finished about 1357; that on the right, carved in 1371 by Leonardo di Ser Giovanni, consists of the story of St. James and the finding of his body at Campostella.  All the guide-books tell you that it was this treasure that Vanni Fucci stole on Shrove Tuesday in 1292, but, as I suppose, since this altar was not begun till 1314, it must have been the earlier treasure which this replaced.  Vanni Fucci is famous because of his encounter with Dante in Hell.

        “Vanni Fucci am I called,

Not long since rained down from Tuscany
To this dire gullet.  Me the bestial life
And not the human pleased, mule that I was,
Who in Pistoja found my worthy den.”

Dante tell us—­

“I did not mark
Through all the gloomy circles of the abyss,
Spirit that swelled so proudly ’gainst his God."[142]

It is in Pistoja better almost than anywhere else in Italy that these early sculptors—­men who were at work here before Niccolo Pisano came from Apulia—­may be studied.  Rude enough as we may think, they are yet in their subtle beauty, if we will but look at them, the marvellous product of a time which many have thought altogether barbarous.  Consider, then, the reliefs over the door of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, or the sculptures on the fagade of S. Bartolommeo in Pantano, the work of Rodolfinus and Guido Bigarelli of Como:  they are all works of the twelfth century, and it is, as I think, no naive beginning we see, but the last hours of an art that is already thousands of years old, about to be born again in the work of Pisano.  And indeed we may trace very happily the rise of Tuscan sculpture in Pistoja.  Though she possesses no work of Niccolo himself, his influence is supreme in the pulpit of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, and it is the beautiful work of his son Giovanni we see in the great pulpit of S. Andrea, where you enter by a door carved in 1166 by Gruamonte with the Adoration of the Magi.  Unlike the work of Fra Guglielmo in S. Giovanni, the pulpit of S. Andrea is hexagonal, and there Giovanni has carved in high relief the Birth of Our Lord, the Adoration of the Magi, the Murder of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment.  They were carved in 1301, before Giovanni began the Pisan pulpit now in the Museo in that city.  And if we see here the first impulse of the Gothic, the Romantic spirit, in Italian art, as in Niccolo’s work we have seen the classic inspiration, it is the far result of these panels that we may discover in the terra-cotta frieze on