Nicola Pisano

Nicola Pisano (born c. 1220, Apulia?—died 1278/84, Pisa?) was a sculptor whose work, along with that of his son Giovanni and other artists employed in their workshops, created a new sculptural style for the late 13th and the 14th centuries in Italy.

Pisano’s origins are unclear. He is first recorded in 1260 in Pisa (or perhaps 1259, if corrections are made for the medieval Pisan calendar), but documents of 1266 twice call him “Master Nicola from Apulia,” Apulia being the province located in the southeastern section of the Italian peninsula. While most scholars now accept an Apulian birth for Pisano, there is still little known about his artistic training. His sculptural training, in line with medieval practices, was probably obtained through an apprenticeship in an already established workshop. If he began his training in Apulia he would most likely have been taught by one of the army of craftsmen whom the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II had employed to decorate his vast new building projects. Frederick’s artists consciously imitated an ancient Roman style of sculpture in order to give visual support to his role as the Holy Roman emperor. If on the other hand, Pisano had actually left Apulia before receiving his sculptural training, he might have apprenticed himself to either local Tuscan or Lombard workshops; strong echoes of both regional styles appear in his work.

Although no work can definitely be attributed to Pisano before his pulpit in the baptistery of Pisa (1259/60), the strong classical spirit that motivates its forms suggests more than simple first-hand experience and fascination with then visible ancient Roman sculpture. Quite specific formal motifs in the figures of the Pisa pulpit compare closely with sculptural fragments representing Jupiter and imperial advisers from Frederick’s triumphal gateway over the Via Appia at Capua and argue persuasively for Pisano’s training in the artistic workshops of the Emperor. Pisa’s close alliance with the empire of Frederick II, even after Frederick’s death in 1250, would have provided good reasons both for his emigration to that city and for the rather sudden emergence of the overtly classicizing style of the pulpit which he carved.

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The Pisa pulpit marks one of the extraordinary moments in the history of Western art when a new style, distinct from all its predecessors, though indebted to them, clearly asserted itself and opened new avenues for artistic expression drawing on the widest possible range of artistic motifs—Roman reliefs, early Christian fresco and mosaic decorations, and localized Tuscan and Lombard forms, as well as isolated motifs deriving from French Gothic sculpture and architecture, about which Pisano may have learned either by visiting French-influenced centres in Apulia or by an actual trip to France. He assimilated this encyclopaedic array of artistic expressions and transformed them into a brilliantly unified whole that gave new grandeur and new energy to his narratives and a new sense of direction to art in Tuscany from 1260 onward.

Pisano’s style changed dramatically during the carving of the Pisa pulpit—from the amplitude of form and rhythmic fluency of movement evident in the relief panel of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple to a greatly more agitated treatment of the space and forms in which figures become smaller in relationship to the entire surface area of the relief and pile up on one another in a surface rather than a spatial organization. The figures themselves become more animated and are twisted to emphasize their dramatic potential more fully. Rather than being a rejection of Pisano’s earliest known style, however, this later style in fact grew directly out of his concern for presenting the human emotional content of his subject matter. Some of this stylistic change, especially the last two reliefs from the Pisa pulpit, may also be attributable to apprentices or members of his workshop, including Giovanni Pisano, his son. Nicola Pisano’s workshop, including Giovanni Pisano, Fra Guglielmo, and Arnolfo di Cambio, also shared in his next commissions, the pulpit for the cathedral of Siena, 1265–68, and the Fontana Maggiore in the main square of Perugia of 1278. In the Siena pulpit, the form of which is much like that of the Pisa pulpit, Pisano continued the investigations of expressive human figures which permeate the Pisan reliefs. Yet, although his authorship of the design is evident throughout the pulpit, the individual dispositions of the various assisting sculptors toward ancient Roman or Gothic forms is equally obvious; the separate strains of the two traditions that Pisano had so successfully united in the Pisa pulpit again reassert their independence at Siena. This uneasy relationship between the antique and the Gothic becomes increasingly clear at Perugia, where the 25-sided fountain mixes tales from Romulus and Remus with fables from Aesop, classical personifications of nearby places with representations of the liberal arts and the labours of the months, and contemporary historical figures with Old Testament characters and heraldic animals. The shifts in the style of the sculpture at Perugia were also influenced by the fact that single figures were employed rather than complex narratives as in Pisano’s earlier work.