BUSCHETTO (BUSCHETO). - Architect and worker on the cathedral of Pisa, remembered as such in a deed of donation of goods to the Works of St Mary Major in Pisa in 1104 and in a bond to the same Works in 1110: probably the same person, also cited in two acts of the canons of the cathedral of Pisa dated 1076 and 1078. An inscription, now lost but reported by De Rossi, informs us that he had raised the Vatican obelisk in Rome; moreover, his exceptional skill in raising extremely heavy masses is extolled, together with his artistic merits, in the two epitaphs in verse (one of which is repeated twice) carved on his tomb, walled into the façade of the Pisan cathedral. In them B. is described as the architect who created that wonderful temple.
But it is very difficult to determine the part he actually played in the construction of the Pisan cathedral, founded in 1063, consecrated in 1118 and whose façade was erected around the middle of the 12th century under a “Ranaldus prudens operatore et ipse magister”. Excavations, tests and stylistic surveys have now established for certain that the present iconography of the cathedral does not reflect that of the period of its foundation but is the result of an enlargement which Salmi supposes was carried out after 1087, the year of the expedition to el-Mehdia, when new commercial and cultural relations with Africa and the East promoted and fostered in Pisa that taste which we see exemplified in the architecture and decoration of the cathedral. B. therefore, who was still alive 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 very simple basilican building, perhaps a cross-commissa with a slightly projecting transept and ashlar facing, into a grand Latin-cross structure with transepts and dome, and with sides marked by blind arcades and pilasters and clad in marble with rose windows and coffered ceilings in polychrome inlays. This type of architectural decoration, in which B. admirably combined elements derived from classical and Byzantine tradition with echoes of Muslim, Arab-Siculo taste, enjoyed immense success and spread not only to countless churches in Pisa and the surrounding area, but also to Apulia, Corsica and Sardinia: hence B. deserves the credit for having initiated one of the most important and fruitful currents of Italian Romanesque architecture.