for the church of San Jacopo di Pistoja were prepared by Niccola, who employed certain Tuscan artists to decorate the apse in mosaic. This apse, admired in those days as a work of great expense and difficulty, awakens more compassion or ridicule than admiration in our own times, and the rather as the defects then prevailing were manifest not in Tuscany only, but through all Italy, where many buildings and other works, executed without design or method, because of the little knowledge to which men had then attained in the art of design, serve only to prove the poverty of their invention, and to show us what unmeasured riches were badly expended by the people of those times, for lack of masters capable of worthily executing the works confided to them.
In this state of things, Niccola perpetually increased his fame by the works he performed, both in sculpture and architecture, acquiring a better name than any of the sculptors or architects then working in Romagna ; his right to which may be seen in Sant’ Ippolito and San Giovanni of Faenza, in the cathedral of Ravenna, in San Francesco, in the houses of the Traversari, and in the church of Porto, as well as in Rimini, where the town-hall, the palaces of the Malatesta family, and other edifices, are all in a much ruder manner than the old buildings erected at the same period in Tuscany.
And what is here said of Romagna, may be affirmed with equal truth respecting a part of Lombardy. One needs only to examine the cathedral of Ferrara, and such other buildings as were erected by the Marquis Azzo, to be convinced of this truth, and to perceive how inferior these attempts are to the Santo[1] of Padua, built after the designs of Niccola,—or to the church of the Frari in Venice, both magnificent and deservedly celebrated works. Many artists of Niccola’s day, incited by a laudable ambition, devoted themselves to the study of sculpture with more zeal than they had previously done, more particularly in Milan, where many Lombards and Germans had assembled for the construction of the cathedral, but who were afterwards dispersed by the hostilities that arose between the Milanese and the Emperor Frederick, when these artists were distributed over all Italy, where much emulation arising among them, they produced
- ↑ The church of St. Anthony of Padua, so called, par eminence, St. Anthony being the protector of that city.
