Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman models in any slavish spirit.
They were neither numerous nor excellent enough to compel blind imitation
or to paralyse inventive impulse. The thoughts to be expressed in marble
by the first modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved him from
that tendency to idle reproduction which proved the ruin of the later
neo-pagan sculptors. Yet the fragments of antique work he found within his
reach, helped him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and
established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of
form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to
native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the
bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men
struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It
remains his crowning merit to have first expressed the mythology of
Christianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with the conscious aim
of a real artist. And here it may be noticed that, a true Italian, he
infused but little of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Niccola is
more of a humanist, if this word may be applied to a sculptor, than some
of his immediate successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery of
Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, the fountain in the
marketplace of Perugia, and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of
them designed and partly finished between 1260 and 1274 by Niccola and his
scholars, display his mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity of
his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their fellow-townsman's pulpit
that a law was passed and guardians were appointed for its
preservation--much in the same way as the Zeus of Pheidias was consigned
to the care of the Phaidruntai.

Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Giovanni, and the numerous pupils
employed upon the monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and Perugia,
carried on the tradition of their master, and spread his style abroad
through Italy. Giovanni Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the
Campo Santo at Pisa, the facade of the Sienese Duomo, and the altar-shrine
of S. Donato at Arezzo--four of the purest works of Gothic art in
Italy--showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and mystic style of
the Transalpine sculptors. We trace a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's
work, not derived from his father, not caught from study of t