Italy
GIOVANNI PISANO.
Half a century later Nicola's son Giovanni
Pisano
(1245/50-after 1314), who
was an equally gifted sculptor, carved a marble pulpit for Pisa
Cathedral. It, too, includes a Nativity (fig.
502). Both panels have a good
many things in common, as we might well expect, yet they also offer a
sharp—and instructive—contrast.
Giovanni's slender, swaying figures, with their smoothly flowing
draperies, recall neither classical antiquity nor the Visitation group
at Reims. Instead, they reflect the elegant style of the royal court at
Paris that had become the standard Gothic formula during the later
thirteenth century. And with this change there has come about a new
treatment of relief: to Giovanni Pisano, space is as important as
plastic form. The figures are no longer tightly packed together. They
are now spaced far enough apart to let us see the landscape setting that
contains them, and each figure has been allotted its own pocket of
space. If Nicola's Nativity strikes us as essentially a sequence
of bulging, rounded masses, Giovanni's appears to be made up mainly of
cavities and shadows.

503.Madonna and Child.
1305-06.
Marble, height: 129 cm.
Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua
504. Madonna and Child.
c. 1299.
Ivory.
Treasury, Duomo, Pisa
Madonna and Child.
c. 1280.
Marble.
Camposanto, Pisa
Giovanni
Pisano, then, follows the same trend toward disembodiment
that we encountered north of the Alps around
1300, only he does so in a more limited way.
Compared to The Virgin of Paris (fig.
491), his Madonna (figs. 503 and
504) immediately evokes memories
of Nicola's style. The three-dimensional firmness of the modeling is
further emphasized by the strong turn of the head and the thrust-out
left hip. We also note the heavy, buttresslike folds that anchor the
figure to its base. Yet there can be no doubt that the Prato statue
derives from a French prototype which must have been rather like The
Virgin of Paris. The back view, with its suggestion of "Gothic
sway," reveals the connection more clearly than the front view, which
hides the pose beneath a great swathe of drapery.
Pulpits in
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia
(1301-11)

Pulpit
1301
Marble, height: 455 cm
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia

Massacre of the Innocents
1301
Marble, 84 x 102 cm
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia

Story of the Birth of Jesus
1301
Marble, 84 x 102 cm
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia

Adoration of the Magi
1301
Marble, 84 x 102 cm
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia

Pulpit (detail)
1301
Marble, height: 89 cm
Sant'Andrea, Pistoia
Pulpits in
Cathedral, Pisa
(1301-11)

Pulpit
1302-11
Marble, height: 461 cm
Cathedral, Pisa

502. GIOVANNI PTSANO. The Nativity, detail of
pulpit. 1302-10. Marble. Pisa Cathedral

Crucifixion
1302-10
Marble
Cathedral, Pisa

Pulpit (detail)
1302-10
Marble
Cathedral, Pisa

Pulpit (detail)
1302-10
Marble
Cathedral, Pisa

Isaiah (detail). 1285-97. Marble. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena
Maria Moise (Miriam). 1285-97. Marble. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena
Plato. c. 1280. Stone. Duomo, Siena
Sibyl. 1285-95. Marble. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena
Haggai. 1285-95. Marbel, height: 61 cm. Duomo, Siena
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Giovanni Pisano
Giovanni Pisano, (born c. 1250, Pisa—died after 1314,
Siena?), sculptor, sometimes called the only true Gothic
sculptor in Italy. He began his career under the classicist
influence of his father, Nicola, and carried on this
tradition after his father’s death, continuously
reintegrating the antique style into more northerly and
contemporary Gothic forms.
Pisano began his career in his father
Nicola Pisano’s workshop and so thoroughly assimilated the
ideas he found there that his early work is difficult to
distinguish from that of his father. It was in the contract
(1265) for the pulpit in the Siena cathedral that Pisano is
first specifically mentioned as an assistant to his father.
Since he was at that time not referred to as “magister,” or
independent master craftsman, Pisano must still have been in
his teens. At any rate, by September 1285 he had rejected
his Pisan citizenship and had become a resident of Siena.
Around this time he began his work on the design and
sculptural ornamentation of the facade for the cathedral of
Siena which became, in its lavishness and ordering, the
model for virtually all future Gothic facade decoration in
central Italy. Unlike French examples, in which figural
ornament pulsates over the entire facade, Pisano’s designs
for the Siena facade offer a much more architectural
approach to the problem. The lower story is simply decorated
with colonnettes (small columns) and a restrained foliate
pattern, which follows the vertical movement of the
colonnettes. Aside from the carved lintels over the doors,
figural sculpture begins at the level of the arches over the
entrances with slightly larger than life-size figures of
prophets and sibyls and continues throughout the rest of the
facade. Although each figure inhabits a discrete niche,
agitated, forward-bending poses cause them to converse
across the vast space of the facade and soften the otherwise
clearly stated architectonic lines that order the structure.
Recent research has emphasized particularly close
relationships in design between the sculpture of the Siena
facade and French foliate patterns and figural reliefs,
especially from the cathedral at Auxerre. Since there are no
known documentary references to Giovanni Pisano between 1268
and 1278, the possibility of a trip through France during
these years seems extremely likely.
Next to the Siena cathedral facade,
Pisano’s pulpit in Pistoia, completed in 1301, is his
greatest achievement. The five narrative reliefs of this
pulpit roughly parallel the subject matter of his father
Nicola’s Pisa pulpit 40 years earlier, as does the overall
architectural format, but the style pushes the expressive
qualities innate in Nicola’s Pisa pulpit to a new level of
intensity. In the “Annunciation,” the “Nativity,” and the
“Annunciation to the Shepherds,” the extreme agitation that
characterizes all the reliefs for the Pistoia pulpit
pulsates throughout the panel. Figures, animals, drapery,
and landscape features are wrenched into physically
impossible configurations; light shatters over the broken
surfaces and deeply cut relief; and each figure responds
convulsively to the individual situations in which he acts
as a participant. What is critical to the change in style
from the first Pisa pulpit reliefs to the Pistoia reliefs is
a preference for an overall agitated and deeply cut surface
as opposed to the earlier more massive and monumental
organization of forms.
Pisano never repeated the frenzy of forms
that covers the Pistoia pulpit. Instead he returned to the
more stately, classical spirit that had been at the heart of
his father’s earliest work. The reasons for this cannot be
documented, but they most likely stem in part from
Giovanni’s experience with Giotto’s monumental and heroic
style which was already in the ascendancy by the time that
the Pistoia pulpit was completed. Pisano, in fact, carved a
marble Madonna and Child for the Arena Chapel in Padua at
approximately the same time that Giotto painted his
profoundly moving fresco cycle there (c. 1305). In addition,
the quasi-imperial political movements established by Pope
Boniface VIII at the turn of the 14th century may also have
prompted him to return to more overtly classical quotations.
From 1302 to 1310 Pisano again worked in
Pisa, this time for a pulpit for the cathedral. In this
pulpit, now badly reconstructed after having been
disassembled, the relief style is considerably more docile
than that of the Pistoia reliefs. His last recorded work was
a tomb sculpture for Margaret of Luxembourg in Genoa in 1311
(fragments now in the Palazzo Bianco). He was last recorded
in Siena in 1314, and it is presumed that he died shortly
thereafter. If, as is clear from his work in Siena, Pisano
was Italy’s only Gothic sculptor, it is also true that he
never lost sight of the heritage of classical Rome that
underlies all of the artistic thinking of central Italy.
Encyclopædia Britannica
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