The church of S. Sofia at Beneventum, A.D. 788, and the monastery of S. Pietro were built by them, as well as the later cathedrals of Trani, Bari, and Ruvo. The latter still retains its ancient Lombard façade covered with figures of animals, the portal being flanked by columns surmounted by a fine rose window. When the Normans succeeded the Longobards and Saracens in Apulia, the Masonic Guild was still more busy there, and it was very probable that Pietro the sculptor worked in Apulia under the Norman dynasty, with many of his brethren. I am told that there is in Bari cathedral a pulpit of the same form as that by Niccolò, but of an earlier date. This is a significant proof of Niccolò's early training in Apulia, probably under his own father, as was the custom of the guild. It would also account for the Saracenic touch in his arches and ornamentation. The lions under the columns were used by the Masonic Guild a century before Niccolò's time, so it is evident they were not, as Ruskin and others suppose, borrowed from the Saracens by Niccolò. There is a most interesting pulpit of the older square form at Groppoli near Pistoja, dated 1194, with lions beneath the pillars. It offers one of the very early specimens of the sculptured scriptural story. The panels represent the "Nativity of Christ" and the "Flight into Egypt," both most naïvely designed. The square pulpit of Guido da Como in S. Bartolommeo at Pistoja is dated A.D. 1250, and shows the immense improvement art had made in those sixty years. In some ways Guido da Como quite equals Niccolò. He does not strain after the classic, but there is great and simple dignity, and even grace in his figures, some of which are almost worthy of Fra Angelico. It was ten years after Guido's lion-pillared pulpit was finished, that we find Niccolò—who had for some years been working at Pisa, where he was then domiciled—sculpturing his famous pulpit there, and though altering the form from square to octagon, using the same symbolism, and in many ways the same treatment of his subject, as Guido had done before him. It would be a suggestive proof of the same influence in training, to compare the panels representing the Nativity, in the three pulpits. The Lombard one at Groppoli, Guido da Como's at Pistoja, and Niccolò's at Pisa, and one might add a fourth, i.e. Giovanni Pisano's pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja, which is in some respects an advance on his father's design, although it is evidently not only inspired, but almost copied from it. There are in all four, the same kind of lectis for bed, the same cows, out of perspective, high up in the background, and in the two last the same treatment of drapery. In some ways, however, Niccolò has passed far beyond Guido. While Guido followed his forefathers' traditions, Niccolò had been first revelling in the richness of Saracenic types in Apulia, and then living among the classic spoils of Pisa, where Diotisalvi had worked before him.
Pulpit in the Church of Groppoli near Pistoja. A.D. 1194.
His school at Pisa inaugurated a revival which was to change art for all the world. Yet it was only a step and not a sudden leap. He was no ancestorless genius springing from darkness and chaos, but a link in the chain of art from which in him a new strand departed, leading towards Donatello and Ghiberti. He took the forms of his sect, but improved and freed them; he held to the traditional symbolism of his guild, but classicized and enriched it. His greatest advance was in the modelling of the human figure, and here his classic models helped him. One suspects that he depended much on those models, for where he had no antique to copy from, he degenerated into the mediævalism of his fraternity. The mixture of the two styles is very apparent in the different panels of his pulpit, some of which look as if they had come from Antonine's column, while others are heavier and less graceful by far than Guido da Como's simple natural figures. The fact was, that in his time the whole guild was developing under the freer conditions of art, and Niccolò was one of its leading masters, and endowed with especial talent.
With him the Romanesque period closes, and the Italian Gothic begins. Led by him the Comacines in Tuscany left the rude, distorted images and meaningless monsters behind, and marched on towards the perfection of sculpture of the human form as shown by Donatello and Michael Angelo.
Pulpit in Siena Cathedral. By Niccolò Pisano. a.d. 1266.