Niccolo Pisano appears to have been born in Apulia, and to have come to Pisa about the middle of the thirteenth century.  We know scarcely anything of his life.  The earliest record in which we find his name is the contract of 1265, in which he binds himself to make a pulpit for the Duomo of Siena.[59] There he is called Magister Niccolus lapidum de paroccia ecclesie Sancti Blasii de Ponte, de Pisis quondam Petri.  Another document of later date describes him as Magister Nichola Pietri de Apulia.  Coming thus to Pisa from Apulia, possibly after many wanderings, in about 1250, his childhood had been passed not among the Tuscan hills, but in Southern Italy among the relics of the Roman world.  It is not any sudden revelation of Roman splendour he receives in the Campo Santo of Pisa, but just a reminder, as it were, of the things of his childhood, the broken statues of Rome that littered the country of his birth.  Thus in a moment this Southerner transforms the rude art of his time here in Tuscany, the work of Bonannus, for instance, the carvings of Biduinus, and the bas-reliefs at San Cassiano,[60] with the faint memory of Rome that lingered like a ghost in the minds of men, that already had risen in the laws and government of the cities, in the desire of men here in Pisa, for instance, for liberty, and that was soon to recreate the world.  If the Roman law still lived as tradition and custom in the hearts of men, the statues of the gods were but hiding for a little time in Latin earth.  It was Niccolo Pisano who first brought them forth.

The pulpit which he made for Pisa—­perhaps his earliest work—­is in the form of a hexagon resting upon nine columns; the central pillar is set on a strange group, a man, a griffin, and animals; three others are poised on the backs of lions; while three are set on simple pediments on the ground; and three again support the steps.  A “trefoil arch” connects the six chief pillars, on each of which stands a statue of a Virtue.  It is here that we came for the first time upon a figure not of the Christian world, for Fortitude is represented as Hercules with a lion’s cub on his shoulder.  In the spandrels of the trefoils are the four Evangelists and six Prophets.  Above the Virtues rise pillars clustered in threes, framing the five bas-reliefs and supporting the parapet of the pulpit; and it is here, by these the most beautiful and extraordinary works of that age in Italy, that Niccolo Pisano will be for ever remembered.

Poor in composition though they be, they are full of marvellous energy, a Roman dignity and weight.  It is antiquity flowering again in a Christian soil, with a certain new radiance and sweetness about it, a naivete almost ascetic, that was certainly impossible from any Roman hand.