Buschetto (Buscheto)

BUSCHETTO (BUSCHETO). - Architect and master builder of the cathedral of Pisa, remembered as such in a deed of donation of property to the Opera of S. Maria Maggiore in Pisa of 1104 and in an obligation to the same Opera of 1110: he is probably the same person, also cited in two acts of the chapter of the cathedral of Pistoia dated 1076 and 1078. An inscription, now lost but reported by De Rossi, informs us that he had raised the Vatican obelisk in Rome: and moreover his exceptional skill in raising extremely heavy masses is extolled, together with his artistic merits, in the two verse epitaphs (one of which is repeated twice) carved on his tomb, walled onto the facade of the Pisan Cathedral. In them B. is indicated as the architect creator of that wondrous temple.

But it is very difficult to establish the part he actually had in the construction of the Pisan Cathedral, founded in 1063, consecrated in 1118 and whose facade was erected around the middle of the 12th century under a certain « Rainaldus prudens operator et ipse magister ». From excavations, tests and stylistic surveys there is now certainty that the present iconography of the Cathedral does not reflect that of the era of its foundation but is the fruit of an enlargement which Salmi supposes was carried out after 1087, the year of the expedition of el-Mehdia, when new commercial and cultural relations with Africa and the East promoted and favored in Pisa that taste which we see exemplified in the architecture and decoration of the Cathedral. B. therefore, who was still living in 1110, could hardly have been the first architect of the Cathedral founded in 1063; but he was the one who transformed the primitive and quite simple basilical building, perhaps a croix commise with a slightly projecting transept and a facing of squared ashlars, into a grandiose structure with a Latin cross plan, with matronaeum and dome, and with sides articulated by blind arcades and pilasters and clad in marbles with rosettes and coffers with polychrome inlays. This type of architectural decoration, in which B. was able to wonderfully combine elements derived from the classical and Byzantine tradition with echoes of Muslim, Arab-Sicilian taste, had immense fortune and diffusion not only in countless Pisan churches and those of the neighboring area, but in Apulia, Corsica and Sardinia: whence to B. belongs the merit of having initiated one of the most important and fruitful currents of Italian Romanesque architecture.

Enzo Carli