JOHN of Peterborough. - Author to whom is usually attributed the admirable *Chronicon Petroburgense* from the year 654 to the year 1368, contained in the manuscript Cotton Claudius A. 5.
An annotation written there by a hand of the 17th century attributes it to Johannes Abbas, without giving any reference. But there was no abbot in Peterborough with this name between John de Caleto (1250–63) and John Deeping, elected in 1408. Simon Patrick, who in 1686 edited the publication of Simon Gunton’s history of the Church of Peterborough, attributes the authorship of the *Chronicon* to John de Caleto, though it cites a work that appeared after the death of this abbot. Joseph Sparke, in his *Historia anglicana scriptores varii* (1723), considers John Deeping the probable author. J. Leland (1552) believes it with probability to be the work of Johannes Abbas de Burgo; John Pitts (*De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus*, Paris 1610, pp. 448) states that Johannes Burgenis
Giovanni Pisano – Madonna and Child, Ivory sculpture, Pisa, sacristy of the Cathedral.
was commissioned by the Commune of Siena, together with Duccio di Buoninsegna and other known masters, to deliberate on the construction of a fountain at Pian d’Ovile; in December of the same year he oversaw work on the Petriolo Baths, and in May 1296 he was requested by the Commune to provide a design for a new baptistery, which was never built. In 1297, probably following a disagreement with the administration of the Duomo and an inquiry, G. left Siena abruptly and returned to Pisa, where on 15 March 1298 he conducted soundings of the slope of the cathedral’s bell tower. An inscription attests that the pulpit of the church of Sant’Andrea in Pistoia was completed by G. in 1301; and immediately afterward, in 1302, G. began the pulpit for the cathedral of Pisa, whose execution lasted until 1312. Yet by 1310 G. had already established his residence in Siena, where in 1299 he had purchased a house in Piazza del Duomo and a farm in the area of Bolcaino. In 1314 the sculptor was still living in Siena; the year of his death is not known precisely. He was buried at the foot of the cathedral of Siena.
Based on these securely documented facts, it is possible to reconstruct the stylistic development of G., identifying his earliest works in collaboration with his father on the pulpit of Siena, some parts of which, such as the panel with the Massacre of the Innocents and the Apocalyptic Christ, stand out for their impassioned fervor and harsh execution, which, albeit with some immaturity, already reveal G.’s independence from the classical serenity of Nicola’s conceptions. Always in close collaboration with his father, G. executed between 1268–76 and 1278–84 some of the colossal marble busts of Prophets, Evangelists, and the Madonna and Child on the exterior of the baptistery of Pisa, while in the Fonte di Perugia his contribution is more identifiable in the statuettes of the upper basin. It is only after Nicola’s death, however, that G. gives his first great demonstration of his abilities as a sculptor and architect, designing the façade of the cathedral of Siena (later completed in the second half of the 14th century not in accordance with G.’s design) and carving for it a series of statues (Philosophers of Antiquity, Prophets, Evangelists, the Sibyl, Moses’ Mother) that constitute the first great cycle of monumental statuary in Italian art. Many of these statues were removed from the cathedral during the last war and placed in the Museo dell’Opera: in them G.’s genius is revealed in all its grandeur, not only for the strongly individual character imprinted on each represented figure, but also for the highly personal way in which the sculptor appropriated the Gothic taste for flowing, undulating lines and the infinite variety of solutions he was able to give to the theme of the full-round figure, dramatically animated and freed from any formal subjection to the architecture for which it was intended. In this respect, therefore, G.’s statuary art is entirely distinct from that of the great northern sculptors of the cathedrals of France and Germany, and unmistakably and powerfully characterizes the Italian contribution to the formulation of the figurative culture of the Gothic age. In the pulpit of Pistoia, G. reprises the scheme of his father’s pulpits, with a hexagonal chest and base surrounded by five relief panels interspersed with statuettes and sculptural groups that, through trilobed arcading with figures of Prophets and Evangelists in the spandrels and Sibyls at the corners, rises on colonnettes alternately resting on lions; but the structure is more slender, the arches are pointed, and above all different is the conception of the relief, executed with violent contrasts of shadow and light in the deep undercutting and the sharp, synthetic profiling of the projections. With impetuous, dramatic fervor, G. interpreted the traditional themes of the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment, inventing daring foreshortenings, breaking profiles, creating strong dissonances of volumes: so that in every single panel there circulates an irrepressible impetus of movement that finds its most intense and acute expressions in the convulsed and rugged scenes of the Massacre and the Judgment. The pulpit of the cathedral of Pisa is circular in shape, with seven panels around it, plus two lateral ones at a landing, and instead of resting entirely on columns, it rests in part on statues and grand groups of multiple full-round figures. The result is a greater decorative exuberance, a more markedly plastic character, while the surfaces of the reliefs, instead of being flat, are convex to allow for a more dynamic and fanciful play of light and shadow; for it is now this, on a worn and reduced plastic material, that evokes through its flashes phantoms of figures imbued with unprecedented energy and dramatic immediacy that borders on expressionism. Among these masterpieces, fundamental milestones in the rapid evolution of Giovanni’s plastic art, are a few other notable works, such as the two small wooden Crucifixes in the church of Sant’Andrea in Pistoia and in the Museo dell’Opera in Siena, the ivory Madonna of the cathedral of Pisa, the Madonna formerly in the Camposanto in Pisa—which first articulates the most gentle theme, dear to so much 14th-century painting, of the silent dialogue of gazes between the Mother and the Divine Child—the Madonna with two angels holding candelabra in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the one formerly on the lunette of the main portal of the baptistery of Pisa, the one in the cathedral of Prato, which is the last in the series; and finally the admirable remains of the tomb of Margaret, wife of Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg (c. 1312), preserved in the Museo Civico in Genoa. Even in these lesser works, G.’s individualistic and ceaselessly passionate temperament is revealed with a coherence of language and a boldness of formal solutions that make him not only the greatest but also the most daringly revolutionary and most modern sculptor of the entire Gothic period. – See pl. XLVI.