GIOVANNI PISANO. – Sculptor, son of the sculptor Nicola di Pietro d'Apulia, born in Pisa around 1284, died between 1316 and 1318. A pupil and assistant of his father, he collaborated with him, with Arnolfo di Cambio, and with others in executing the pulpit for Siena Cathedral (1267–68), and thereafter, always alongside Nicola, he is mentioned in the inscription on the Fonte di Piazza at Perugia. Nicola having died before March 1284, G. went to Siena, where between October 1284 and September 1285 he was granted citizenship and exemption from every burden, duty, levy, tax, compulsory service, and military expedition.
Indeed, as is shown by a document of 1287, he worked under the authority of the Opera del Duomo, of which he was appointed master builder; in 1290 he was condemned for an unspecified offense, but in recognition of his merits, which made him indispensable to the cathedral works, his prison sentence was commuted to a monetary fine. In August 1295, on commission from the Commune of Siena, he deliberated, together with Duccio di Buoninsegna and other well-known masters, on the construction of a fountain at Pian d'Ovile; in December of the same year he was involved in the works at the Baths of Petriolo, and in May 1296 the Commune requested that he provide the design for a new baptistery, which was never built. In 1297, probably as a result of disagreements with the administration of the Duomo and of an inquiry, G. suddenly left Siena and returned to Pisa, where on 15 March 1298 he carried out soundings of the inclination of the Duomo bell tower. An inscription attests that the pulpit of S. Andrea in Pistoia was completed by G. in 1301; immediately afterward, in 1302, G. began the pulpit for Pisa Cathedral, whose execution continued until 1312. But as early as 1310 G. had established his residence in Siena, where in 1299 he had purchased a house in Piazza del Duomo and an estate in the area of Bolciano. 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 Siena Cathedral.
On the basis of these securely established documentary data, it is possible to reconstruct G.’s stylistic development, identifying his earliest works as having been produced under his father’s direction in the Siena pulpit. Some parts of it, such as the panel with the Massacre of the Innocents and the Apocalyptic Christ, are distinguished by a pathetic intensity and an execution of such harshness that, despite a certain immaturity, they already reveal G.’s independence from the classical serenity of Nicola’s conceptions. Still in close collaboration with his father, G. executed, between 1268 and 1276 and between 1278 and 1284, some of the colossal marble busts of Prophets, Evangelists, and the Madonna and Child on the exterior of the Pisa baptistery, while at the Perugia fountain his intervention can be more clearly identified in the statuettes of the upper basin. It was only after Nicolò’s death, however, that G. gave the first great demonstration of his abilities as sculptor and architect, designing the façade of Siena Cathedral (later completed in the second half of the 14th century in a manner not conforming to G.’s project) and sculpting for it a series of statues (Philosophers of Antiquity, Prophets, Evangelists, the Sibyl, Mary of Moses) that constitute the first great cycle of monumental statuary in Italian art. Many of these statues were removed from the Duomo during the last war and placed in the Museo dell’Opera; in them G.’s genius appears in all its greatness, not only because of the powerful individuality stamped upon each represented figure, but also because of the highly personal manner in which the sculptor made the Gothic taste for the flowing, undulating line his own, and because of the infinite variety of solutions he was able to give to the theme of the fully rounded figure, dramatically animated and freed from every formal subjection to the architecture for which it was intended. In this respect, therefore, G.’s statuary differs completely from that of the great northern sculptors of the cathedrals of France and Germany, and it unmistakably and powerfully characterizes the Italian contribution to the formulation of the visual civilization of the Gothic age. In the Pistoia pulpit G. takes up the scheme of his father’s pulpits, with its hexagonal case and plan surrounded by five relief panels, interspersed with statuettes and sculptural groups which, by means of connections formed by trefoil arches with figures of Prophets and Evangelists in the spandrels and Sibyls at the corners, rises on little columns resting alternately on lions. But the structure is more slender, the small arches are pointed, and above all the conception of the relief is different, executed through violent contrasts of shadow and light in the deep recesses and in the sharp, synthetic profiling of the projecting elements. 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 extraordinarily bold foreshortenings, breaking up profiles, and creating powerful dissonances of volume. Thus, in every individual panel, an irrepressible impulse of movement circulates, finding its most intense and acute expressions in the turbulent and rugged scenes of the Massacre and the Judgment. The pulpit of Pisa Cathedral is circular in form, with seven panels around it, plus two lateral ones beside a gallery, and instead of resting entirely on columns, it rests in part on statues and on grandiose groups of several fully rounded figures. The result is a greater decorative exuberance and a more markedly sculptural character, while the surfaces of the reliefs, instead of being flat, are convex, to permit a more animated and imaginative play of the incidences of light. By now, upon a sculptural material worn away and reduced to pure linear notation, it is the light that conjures up, through its flashes, phantoms of figures marked by unheard-of energy and by a dramatic vividness that almost borders on expressionism. Among these masterpieces, fundamental stages in the rapid evolution of Giovanni’s sculptural art, there are a few other notable works, such as the two small wooden Crucifixes in the church of S. Andrea at Pistoia and in the Museo dell’Opera of Siena; the ivory Madonna in Pisa Cathedral; the Madonna formerly in the Camposanto of Pisa, in which the exquisitely graceful theme—dear to so much fourteenth-century painting—of the silent exchange of glances between the Mother and the Divine Son is first articulated; the Madonna with the two little angels holding candelabra in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua; the one formerly on the lunette of the main portal of the Pisa baptistery; the one in Prato Cathedral, which is the last in the series; and finally the marvelous remains of the tomb of Margherita, wife of the emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg (around 1312), preserved in the Museo civico of Genoa. Even in these minor undertakings, G.’s individualistic and intensely passionate temperament is revealed through a consistency of language and a boldness of formal solutions that make him not only the greatest, but also the most daringly revolutionary and the most modern sculptor of the entire Gothic period. – Vedi tav. XLVI.