Pulpit in the Pisa Baptistery
The pulpit in the Pisa Baptistery was completed by Nicola Pisano and his assistants in 1260, and has long been regarded as a landmark in Italian art, especially for its large relief panels around the platform.[1] For Kenneth Clark the pulpit was "that false dawn of the Renaissance", as its innovations were not followed up for some time.[2] The nude male figure, called Daniel or Fortitude, but based on a Roman Hercules, has long been a particular focus of attention as "the first heroic nude in Italian art" (as opposed to Roman art).[3]
Large raised pulpits, elaborately carved with relief panels, were important monuments in the Italian Duecento, with the best known including those of the baptistery at Pisa (dated 1260), Siena Cathedral Pulpit (1268) also by Nicola Pisano, and by his son Giovanni Pisano, who went on to make the Pulpit of Sant' Andrea, Pistoia, 1297–1301, and that in Pisa Cathedral (1302–1310).[4]
Corner, at the mid-level
The base of the central column
Context[edit]
The artists[edit]
This is the earliest known work by Nicola Pisano, but he must have been an experienced and highly regarded master to have been given such an important and complex commission; he was probably working in Pisa by 1250.[37] His assistants probably included his young son Giovanni Pisano, who said he was born in Pisa, and Arnolfo di Cambio, but unlike his next large job, the Siena Cathedral Pulpit, there are no known documents recording the workers and payments. More than in the Siena pulpit, the Pisa one "seems largely to be due to a single hand", with "an apparently effortless technical virtuosity, particularly with the drill".[38]
After some work on the Arca di San Domenico in Bologna in 1264–1265, and the Siena pulpit, completed in 1268, Nicola's last known project was the Fontana Maggiore in Perugia, completed in 1278. By 1284 he was dead.[39]
Replica[edit]
The Weston Cast Court in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a full-scale replica plaster cast, with paint, made in 1864 by Messrs Franchi & Son of London and bought for £116 13s 4d.[44]