30 
GATES OF THE BAPTISTERY. 
that Niccola da Pisa, in the thirteenth century, first caught the spirit of 
ancient art. Various degrees of relief, background figures and objects, 
and occasional attempts at perspective, are to be found in the works of the 
Pisani and their scholars ; yet their works, which are to be regarded as the 
infancy of Italian art, and which undoubtedly are rude enough in work¬ 
manship and imitation, are purer in style than those of the succeeding 
Florentine masters, who attained so much greater perfection in sculpture. 
The rilievi of Donatello are mostly in the style called stiacciato (the 
flattest kind of basso-rilievo), yet, in such a style commanding little dis¬ 
tinctness from its inconsiderable projection, he introduced buildings, 
landscape, and the usual accessories of a picture. But this misapplication 
of ingenuity was carried still further by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the celebrated 
bronze doors of the Baptistery or church of San Giovanni in Florence, 
which exhibited such skilful compositions, in which the stories are so 
well told, and in which the single figures are so full of appropriate 
action. In these works, the figures gradually emerge from the stiacciato 
style to alto-rilievo. They are among the best specimens of that mixed 
style or union of basso-rilievo with the principles of painting which the 
sculptors of the fifteenth century and their imitators imagined to be an 
improvement on the well-considered simplicity of the ancients. In these 
and similar specimens the unreal forms of perspective buildings and 
diminished or foreshortened figures, which in pictures create illusion when 
aided by appropriated light and shade and variety of hue, are unintelligible 
or distorted in a real material, where it is immediately evident that the 
objects are all on the same solid plane. Even Vasari, who wrote when 
this mixed style of rilievo was generally practised, remarked the absurdity 
of representing the plane on which the figures stand ascending towards the 
horizon, according to the laws of perspective, in consequence of which “we 
often see,” he says, “the point of the foot of a figure standing with its back 
to the spectator touching the middle of the leg, owing to the rapid ascent 
or foreshortening of the ground. “ Such errors,” he adds, “ are to be seen 
even in the doors of San Giovanni”’ (pp. 121, 123). 
Ghiberti was afterwards elected by ballot a member of the 
Signory or Government of Florence. He received ample 
acknowledgment of his great work in the honours bestowed on 
him by his fellow-citizens, and was commissioned to execute 
other gates which were to have replaced those of Andrea 
Pisano at the southern entrance. It cannot, however, be a 
subject of regret that Ghiberti’s death prevented the execu- 
Sir Charles Eastlake's Literature of the Fine Arts.