Besides The Masterpieces Of Other Masters, There
Is A Most Noble So-Doma, Which The Great Napoleon Carried Away To Paris
And Which The Greater French People Afterward Restored.
At every step in
the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and
sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond
the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur.
Ghirlandajo,
Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna - the names came back to me
out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide
repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or
architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of
Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three
hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars,
faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the
church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo
Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at
intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have
got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire,
being no longer needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last
visit I took Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from
the printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her
objects of interest.
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