What Giotto himself was, as a designer for sculpture, is shown in the little reliefs upon the basement of his campanile.
What has previously been noted in the chapter upon architecture deserves repetition here—that the Italian style of building gave more scope to independent sculpture, owing to its preference for flat walls, and its rejection of multiplied niches, canopies, and so forth, than the Northern Gothic. Thus, however subordinated to architecture, sculpture in Italy still had more scope for self-assertion than in Germany or France.