the dark ages failed to realise.[1]

[1] I am not inclined to reject the old legend mentioned
above about Pisano's study of the antique. For a full
discussion of the question see my 'Fine Arts,'
_Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. chap. iii.

Whether it was Nicola or his scholars who designed the basreliefs at
Orvieto is of little consequence. Vasari ascribes them to the
father; but we know that he completed his pulpit at Pisa in 1230,
and his death is supposed to have taken place fifteen years before
the foundation of the cathedral. At any rate, they are imbued with
his genius, and bear the strongest affinity to his sculptures at
Pisa, Siena, and Bologna. To estimate the influence they exercised
over the arts of sculpture and painting in Italy would be a
difficult task. Duccio and Giotto studied here; Ghiberti closely
followed them. Signorelli and Raphael made drawings from their
compositions. And the spirit which pervades these sculptures may be
traced in all succeeding works of art. It is not classic; it is
modern, though embodied in a form of beauty modelled on the Greek.

The basreliefs are carved on four marble tablets placed beside the
porches of the church, and corresponding in size and shape with the
chief doorways. They represent the course of Biblical history,
beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with the last
judgment. If it were possible here to compare them in detail with
the similar designs of Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, it
might be shown that the Pisani established modes of treating sacred
subjects from which those mighty masters never deviated, though each
stamped upon them his peculiar genius, making them more perfect as
time added to the power of art. It would also be not without
interest to show that, in their primitive conceptions of the
earliest events in history, the works of the Pisan artists closely
resemble some sculptures executed on the walls of Northern
cathedrals, as well as early mosaics in the South of Italy. We might
have noticed how all the grotesque elements which appear in Nicola
Pisano, and which may still be traced in Ghiberti, are entirely lost
in Michel Angelo, how the supernatural is humanised, how the
symbolical receives an actual expression, and how intellectual types
are substituted for mere local and individual representations. For
instance, the Pisani represent the Creator as a young man standing
on the earth, with a benign and di