palace buildings, chapels, paintings, gates, which are the delight
of the world to this day. It was a merchant guild which thought happily
of giving to Florence the bronze gates to the baptistery of San Giovanni
or St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some
competition the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great
group of painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named,
as so often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea
executed a series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the
Baptist, which were cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre
door-way. I shall leave the rest of the gates, still more exquisitely
wrought, till their proper time, only observing that the Pisani group of
carvers and founders are supposed to have attained their extraordinary
superiority in skill and grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in
consequence of one of them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to
the study of some ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.

Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come back
to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in itself
very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians' love
to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di Cione, one
of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about 1315. His
greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.

This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation,
alas, will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial,
though no longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an
arcade, something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running
round, and having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for
the dead were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth
brought from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered
with turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross
in the centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and
contains on its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the
Greek sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of
the Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of
the walls was continued at interv