To return to Niccola who excelled no less as a sculptor than as an architect. For the church of S. Martino at Lucca he executed a deposition from the Cross, which is under the portico above the minor doorway on the left hand as one enters the church. It is executed in marble, and is full of figures in half relief, carried out with great care, the marble being pierced through, and the whole finished in such style as to give rise to hopes in those who first practised this art with the most severe labour, that one would soon come who would give them more assistance with greater ease. It was Niccola also who in the year 1240 designed the church of S. Jacopo at Pistoia, and set some Tuscan masters to work there in mosaic, who did the vaulting of the apse. But although it was considered a difficult and costly thing at the time, it rather moves one to laughter and compassion to-day, and not to admiration, oh account of the poorness of the design, a defect which was prevalent not only in Tuscany, but throughout Italy, where the number of buildings and other things erected without method and without design betray the poverty of their minds no less than the bountiful riches lavished on them by the men of their day; a wasteful expenditure of wealth, because there was no masters capable of executing in a good style the things which they made for them. Now Niccola was steadily increasing his renown in both sculpture and architecture, and was of greater account than the sculptors and architects who were then at work in the Romagna, as one may see in S. Ippolito and S. Giovanni at Faenza, in the Duomo of Ravenna, in S. Francesco, in the houses of the Traversari, and in the church of Prato, and at Rimini, in the public palace, in the houses of the Malatesti, and in other buildings which are much worse than the old buildings erected in Tuscany at the same time; and what is here said of the Romagna, may be repeated with even more truth of a part of Lombardy. It is only necessary to see the Duomo of Ferrara and the other buildings erected for the Marquis Azzo, to perceive at once how different they are from the Santo of Padua, built from Niccola's model, and from the church of the friars minors at Venice, both of them magnificent and famous buildings.