"Nativity" our Lady is no longer the Roman matron of Niccola's conception,
but a graceful mother, young in years, and bending with the weakness of
childbirth. Her attitude, exquisite by the suggestion of tenderness and
delicacy, is one that often reappears in the later work of the Pisan
school--for example, in the rough _abozzamento_ in the Campo Santo at
Pisa, above the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Orvieto on the
facade of the cathedral; but it has nowhere else been treated with the
same sense of beauty. The "Massacre of the Innocents," compared with this
relief, is a tragedy beside an idyll. Here the whole force of Giovanni's
eminently dramatic genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated
the usual incidents of mothers struggling with soldiers and bewailing
their dead darlings, but he has also introduced a motive, which might well
have been used by subsequent artists in dealing with the same subjects.
Herod is throned in one corner of the composition; before him stand a
group of men and women, some imploring the tyrant for mercy, some defying
him in impotent despair, and some invoking the curse of God upon his head.
In the "Adoration of the Magi," again, Giovanni shows originality by the
double action he has chosen to develop. On one side the kings are
sleeping, while an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. On the
other side they fall at the feet of the Madonna. It will be gathered even
from these bare descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life and
movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic intensity, alien to the
ideal of Graeco-Roman sculpture. He effected a fusion between the grand
style revived by Niccola and the romantic fervour of the modern
imagination. It was in this way that the tradition handed down by him
proved inestimably serviceable to the painters.

The bas-reliefs, however, by no means form the chief attraction of this
pulpit. At each of its six angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels,
whose symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The most beautiful
groups are a company of angels blowing the judgment trumpets, and a winged
youth standing above a winged lion and bull. These groups separate the
several compartments of the bas-reliefs, and help to form the body of the
pulpit. Beneath, on capital's of the supporting pillars, stand the Sibyls,
each with her attendant genius, while prophets lean or crouch within the
spandrils of the arches. Thus every po