This does not mean that I wish to swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical.
[58] See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello.
[59] The data is extremely doubtful.

Were we to trust internal evidence--the evidence of style and handling--we should be inclined to name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano's works.
It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from the centre to either side.

There is an engraving of this bas-relief in Ottley's _Italian School of Design._ [60] Rheims Cathedral, for example, was begun in 1211.

Upon its western portals is the loveliest of Northern Gothic sculpture.
[61] Antonio Filarete was commissioned, soon after 1431, by Eugenius IV., to make the great gates of S.Peter's.

The decorative framework represents a multitude of living creatures--snails, snakes, lizards, mice, butterflies, and birds--half hidden in foliage, together with the best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Diana and Actaeon, Europa and the Bull, the Labours of Hercules, &c.