It is wholly impossible to describe the delicacy and finish which the crest of this campanile possesses; the eye is led on from story to story, the mosaic being used more and more freely, the sculpture more sparingly, as the ascent is made, till at last the sculpture ends in one perfectly shaped window, and the mosaic blossoms forth like a flower into fullest beauty. Gradually the massive base, with its dark bas-reliefs, changes into lighter sculpture, with backgrounds of blue marble, then into figures of the saints, prophets, and patriarchs, breaking the uniformity of which are two long vertical pierced panels of quartre-foils in circles, serving to give light to the interior, but not telling as windows, then two rich bands of mosaic carry on the effect up to the first range of windows. There is no difference between the first and second stories, except that the lower one has a rich band of sculpture beneath the window, which is replaced by plain marble in the second; but above the second, as I have said, the sculpture ceases to be the main feature, the mosaic takes its place, and succeeds in carrying out the unison of rich work and lightness of effect in a way which is as novel as it is beautiful.
A few words must be said of the famous range of bas-reliefs, the lowest, all of which were designed by Giotto, though he only lived to execute two. This series is twenty-eight in number, exclusive of those on the small half towers which form the corners of the Campanile. They represent first the creation of man and woman, then the gradual development of knowledge, the gradual increase of man's power over nature, and discovery of his own capacities. Of three of these, illustrations are given which may be relied upon for fidelity to the main points of the design, though they do little justice to the exquisite delicacy of the work.
These bas-reliefs are in lozenge form, about eighteen inches in height and slightly less in breadth, and entirely surround the tower; nearly the whole of these were sculptured by Luca della Robbia and Andrea Pisano, to whom was entrusted the carrying out of Giotto's designs.
I shall not endeavour here to classify these reliefs according to their authorship for two reasons; one, that the carrying out of Giotto's design, whether by Andrea Pisano, Luca della Robbia, or any other sculptor, is as to each special relief a pure matter of conjecture, and is besides little connected with the subject I have in hand; and the other reason is that this classification, though attempted with great ingenuity, and after close investigation by Mr. Ruskin, in his pamphlet on the "Shepherd's Tower," appears to me to have yielded no satisfactory results, but rather to have involved the subject in further obscurity, insomuch as it has led him to attribute various reliefs in the series to Giotto's own hand, wholly on internal evidence, and that moreover in my judgment of a most unsatisfactory nature. I content myself, therefore, with observing that the three first frescoes of the series and the one representing the drunkenness of Noah are almost certainly the work of a different hand to that of the rest of the bas-reliefs, and that that hand has probably modified Giotto's original design to a considerable extent in the relative importance of the landscape portions of the composition.
