Hope

This Spes has become something of a paradigm of the art of Andrea da Pontedera, and not arbitrarily. The sculptor seems to have taken his theme, the pointed arch, from the slender quatrefoil frame, and has modulated it in the most skilful counterpoints, from the wings to the outstretched arms, from the placid turn of the hip to the relation of the knees and the loosened drapery; and yet the result is a figure of such sobriety and of such imposing physical bulk that it can only be described with an allusion to his great friend: Giottesque.