148. Returning to our door at Pisa, we shall find these general questions as to the distribution of ornament much confused with others as to its time and style. We are at once, for instance, brought to a pause as to the degree in which the ornamentation was once carried out in the doors themselves. 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. The uppermost of these stones is nearly pure in its Byzantine style; the lower, already semi-Gothic. Both are exquisite of their kind, and we will examine them closely; but first note these points about the stones of them. We are discussing work at latest of the thirteenth century. Our loss of the inscription is evidently owing to the action of the iron rivets which have been causelessly used at the two horizontal joints. There was nothing whatever in the construction to make these essential, and, but for this error, the entire piece of work, as delicate as an ivory tablet, would be as intelligible to-day as when it was laid in its place. [1]