BUSCHETTO (BUSCHETO). – Architect and master builder of the cathedral of Pisa, mentioned as such in an act of donation of property to the Opera di S. Maria Maggiore of Pisa dated 1104 and in an obligation to the same Opera dated 1110: he was probably the same person who is also cited in two acts of the canons’ chapter of the cathedral of Pistoia dated 1076 and 1078. An inscription, now lost but reported by De Rossi, informs us that he had re-erected the Vatican obelisk in Rome; moreover, his exceptional skill in raising extremely heavy masses is extolled, together with his artistic merits, in the two verse epitaphs (one of them repeated twice) carved on his tomb, set into the façade of the Cathedral of Pisa. In them B. is indicated as the architect who created that marvelous temple.
Yet it is very difficult to establish the part he actually played in the construction of the cathedral of Pisa, founded in 1063, consecrated in 1118, and whose façade was erected around the middle of the 12th century under a “Rainaldus prudens operator et ipse magister.” From excavations, investigations, and stylistic surveys, it is now certain that the present architectural form of the cathedral does not reflect that of the period of its foundation but is the result of an enlargement which Salmi supposes to have been carried out after 1087, the year of the expedition against al-Mahdiya, when new commercial and cultural relations with Africa and the East fostered and encouraged in Pisa the taste 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; rather, he was the man who transformed the primitive and very simple basilican building, perhaps with a T-shaped plan, a slightly projecting transept, and a facing of squared rubble, into a grandiose Latin-cross structure, with galleries and a cupola, its sides articulated by blind arcades and pilasters and faced with marble featuring rosettes and coffers in polychrome inlay. This type of architectural decoration, in which B. admirably combined elements derived from the Classical and Byzantine traditions with echoes of Muslim, Arab-Sicilian taste, achieved immense success and diffusion not only in countless Pisan churches and those of the surrounding area, but also in Apulia, Corsica, and Sardinia. B. thus deserves the credit for initiating one of the most important and fruitful currents of Italian Romanesque architecture.