Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/24

the political conditions of the time were both favourable to the rise of this new Christian art. The first great master of the Renaissance was the sculptor Niccolò Pisano, a man of undoubtedly Tuscan birth, who, by forming his style on antique models, laid the foundation for all future progress. But although Niccolò began, about 1260, by carving Madonnas and angels, after the pattern of the bas-reliefs on ancient sarcophagi, before the end of his career he felt the power of another influence. This was the Gothic movement, which had already produced such splendid results in the architecture and sculpture of French Cathedrals, and was very rapidly spreading south of the Alps. While the romances of French chivalry and the songs of Provençal trouvères became every day more popular in Italy, French ivories and miniatures gradually found their way into Tuscany, and French artists were invited to the Courts of Angevin and Hohenstaufen princes at Naples and Palermo. This Gothic feeling it was which modified Niccolò Pisano's conceptions in later years, and inspired the bas-reliefs and statues of his son Giovanni with that wonderful dramatic sense and vehement energy which brings him so near to Giotto. The new movement soon made itself strongly felt in Florence, where, before the end of the century, a scholar of Niccolò Pisano, Arnolfo di Cambio reared the walls of the Gothic Duomo and the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, and planned the lofty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Painting in its turn felt the new impulse, and the revived artistic activity is evident in the large numbers of painters whose names appear in contemporary records. By the laws of