Their surfaces were, however, I doubt not,
once recipients of the most elaborate ornament, as in the Baptistery of
Florence; and in later bronze, by John of Bologna, in the door of the
Pisan cathedral opposite this one. And when we examine the sculpture
and placing of the lintel, which at first appeared the most completely
Greek piece of construction of the whole, we find it so far advanced in
many Gothic characters, that I once thought it a later interpolation
cutting the inner pilasters underneath their capitals, while the three
statues set on it are certainly, by several tens of years, later still.
149. How much ten years did at this time, one is apt to forget; and how
irregularly the slower minds of the older men would surrender
themselves, sadly, or awkwardly, to the vivacities of their pupils. The
only wonder is that it should be usually so easy to assign conjectural
dates within twenty or thirty years; but, at Pisa, the currents of
tradition and invention run with such cross eddies, that I often find
myself utterly at fault. In this lintel, for instance, there are two
pieces separated by a narrower one, on which there has been an
inscription, of which in my enlarged plate you may trace, though, I
fear, not decipher, the few letters that remain.
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