In the year 1260 Nicola Pisano, the sculptor who initiated the
revival of classicizing ideals that would later form a major
component of Italian Renaissance art, created a remarkable and
unusual monument for the Baptistry of Pisa, a hexagonal pulpit
supported by seven colorful columns and displaying on its parapet
five visually compelling narrative reliefs; several years later he
designed a second pulpit, this time for the cathedral of Siena.
Toward the end of the century, his son Giovanni received a pulpit
commission for the parish church of Sant'Andrea, Pistoia, to be
followed a few years later (c. 1302) by another one for the
cathedral of Pisa. These four extraordinary monuments, each
building upon both older traditions and its own immediate
predecessors, yet each a highly innovative and original solution,
are the primary subject of this book.
The pulpits by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano were produced during a
period of enormous economic, intellectual, cultural and spiritual
flux. The expanded body of knowledge that resulted from the rise of
Scholasticism-a theological-intellectual current that, beginning in
the French cathedral schools of the twelfth century, attempted to
reconcile Christian faith with the newly valued ideals of
observation and reason, in short, to synthesize Christian and
classical learning--found expression in new themes and naturalistic
motifs abounding in painting, book illumination and sculpture, and
in religious and civic iconography. In contrast to the emphasis on
transcendental experience of the earlier Middle Ages, the new
urban-centered religious orders of the thirteenth-century, such as
the Domincans and the Franciscans, fostered a more direct,
empathetic relationship between ordinary mortals and God and his
saints. The Pisano pulpits were profoundly informed by these new
conditions and concerns, and in turn they contributed to changing
perceptions about the natural world and the nature of religious
experience. Indeed, these pulpits are among the earliest visual
manifestations in Italy of the scholastic inclination to embrace a
wide range of knowledge, for the narratives relating biblical
history are augmented by representations of Virtues and Vices,
Liberal Arts, and pagan prophetesses of antiquity.
The sermons expounded from these and other urban pulpits were very
much enhanced by the charisma of their preachers and the interplay
between the verbal and the visual, both of which were expressed in
the "vernacular," that is, in the case of sermons no longer only in
the remote Latin tongue, and in the case of visual imagery no
longer employing the abstract forms and symbols of earlier periods.
But preaching was by no means the sole function of these raised
platforms; they were used for a variety of ceremonial occasions
and, like the para-liturgical mystery and miracle plays that were
becoming increasingly popular, they satisfied the needs for
edification, diversion, and even entertainment, needs as compelling
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as they are today.
In this book we explore in word and image these and other issues
related to the pulpits of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, both as
individual masterpieces and as monuments within the larger context
of pulpit traditions. Nicola and Giovanni, different as were their
sculptural styles, were both consummate story-tellers and it is
nothing less than astonishing to observe the formal devices
employed to make those stories as compelling as possible: We shall
thus witness varying interpretations of the narratives, differing
iconographic emphases and formal devices, changing conceptions of
the human figure, and the development of spatial awareness in the
work of both father and son. By offering close readings of the
narrative and figural iconography, and the sculptural form
conceived to give them expression, this book invites the modern
viewer-reader to follow the itinerary of their original audience,
the worshiper standing before and walking around each pulpit. In
addition, however, numerous close-up views of passages difficult to
see in situ offer privileged access to details readily visible
primarily to the sculptor at work rather than the standing or
circumambulating spectator.
Anita Moskowitz is Professor of Art History at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. Her fields of interest are
art and architecture history, and medieval and Renaissance art.