Tolomei is puzzled by the cypher K, and Ciampi, the collector of inscriptions, has, in reporting this one, left out the last line altogether. He interprets it as implying that Guido having left the work unfinished, Turrisianus finished it. Whilst I was studying lately some old documents in the archives of S. Jacopo at Pistoja, Signor Guido Macciò of that city, who kindly assisted me to read the crabbed old characters, threw a new light on that inscription. He says Tolomei has misread it; that the cypher is not a K but H C, which was plainly legible in a rubbing he took of it, and that _superstans_ merely means overseer; in fact, the Latin form of _operaio_. The same term _superstans_ was used for the head of the _laborerium_ in Rome up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and survived in the later lodges as _soprastante_. Signor Macciò interprets the inscription thus--"The famous sculptor Guido of Como has proved himself learned in art, and his name should be sung in verse, A.D. 1250. Turrisianus (Torrigiani) acted as overseer to this fine work, and may God crown him for superintending the work so well." I leave more learned classics to say which interpretation is the true one. But as in most of the inscriptions, documents, etc. of the guild, the name of the head of the lodge, and often those of the councillors are put in, I incline to think Signor Macciò may be right, and the inscription is another proof of a Masonic lodge in which Torrigiani was, at the time, the head of the administration. [Illustration: PULPIT IN CHURCH OF S. BARTOLOMMEO, PISTOJA. BY GUIDO DA COMO. _See page 230._] Guido's pulpit is of white marble, and in the ancient square form, with eight panels in bas-relief. It rests on three columns; the first stands on a lion with a dragon at its feet, the second on a lioness suckling a cub, the third on a human figure. In this pulpit, and the older one at Groppoli, we have a perceptible link, connecting Niccolò Pisano with the Comacine Guild, which we shall trace more closely when speaking of Romanesque sculpture. There were at that epoch three lodges in the immediate neighbourhood. One in connection with the Opera del Duomo at Pisa, one at Pistoja in the Opera di S. Jacopo, and a third one at Lucca, where Guido and Guidetto were chief sculptors. Besides this there was another in Apulia, where it is thought Niccolò's father Pietro worked. Niccolò's work, and that of Guido the younger, are so very much alike as to warrant the suspicion that they were both pupils of one master, but that Niccolò had in him these greater qualities which go to form an epoch-making artist.