In the procession of the fine arts, sculpture always follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at first appears in some sense as her handmaid.  Mediaeval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the thirteenth century.  It was Niccola Pisano, architect and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath of genius life into the dead forms of plastic art.  From him we date the dawn of the aesthetical Renaissance with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of humanism; for he determined the direction not only of sculpture but also of painting in Italy.  To quote the language of Lord Lindsay’s panegyric:  “Neither Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent and durability of influence; for whatever of highest excellence has been achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only but throughout Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in following up the principle which he first struck out."[56] In truth, Niccola Pisano put the artist on the right track of combining the study of antiquity with the study of nature; and to him belongs the credit not merely of his own achievement, considerable as that may be, but also of the work of his immediate scholars and of all who learned from him to portray life.  From Niccola Pisano onward to Michael Angelo and Cellini we trace one genealogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art beyond the sphere of his invention, looked back to him as their progenitor.  The man who first emancipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened a way for the attainment of true beauty, would by the Greeks have been honoured with a special cultas as the Hero Eponym of art.  It remains for us after our own fashion to pay some such homage to Pisano.

The chief difficulty with which the student of early art and literature has to deal, is the insufficiency of positive information.  Instead of accurate dates and well-established facts he finds a legend, rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjecture.  In the absence of contemporary documents and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradition and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of forgotten history according to his own ideas of fitness.  The Germans have been our masters in this species of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism; and it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian’s vanity to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered fragment of confused narration.  Yet to resist this temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty.  Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be allowed to have its full value; and a sounder historic sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due caution, than in recklessly rejecting it and substituting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders unsubstantial.