Nicola Pisano

NICOLA PISANO. - Sculptor, son of Pietro, b. probably in Apulia around 1220, d. between 1278 and 1284; in documents he is called Nicolae de Pisis, Nichole de Pisis, Nichola Petri de Apulia, Nicola de Apulia and Magister Nichola Pisanus filius quondam Petri.

In 1260 he completed and signed the pulpit of the baptistery of Pisa; between 1264 and 1265 he was perhaps in Bologna; then between 1265 and 1269 he was in Siena in the company of numerous collaborators, among them his son Giovanni and Arnolfo di Cambio, engaged in the work on the pulpit of that Cathedral; between 1272 and 1273 he was in Pistoia to remake the altar in the chapel of the Apostle in the church of S. Jacopo; around 1278 he was in Perugia for the work on the fountain with his son Giovanni, who signed the upper basin with his own name alone. Of these documented works only the altar of Pistoia has been destroyed, while the Sienese pulpit was reworked in the course of the 16th century when it received a new staircase. It is also to be supposed that for the Arca of St. Dominic in the church of the Santo in Bologna N. provided a general drawing or design and attended to the work between 1264 and the beginning of 1265. In that case N. would also have carved some statues, now lost, that supported the arca itself.

Of the other works variously attributed to N. we may recall the two reliefs with the Deposition and the Adoration of the Magi in the lunette and on the architrave of the left door of the Cathedral of Lucca; some heads and some busts of the plastic decoration on the exterior of the baptistery of Pisa; the holy water stoup of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia, perhaps the work of Giovanni. To N. is assigned, following in the footsteps of Vasari, an architectural activity of which the church of S. Trinita in Florence would be the major testimony. A native of Apulia, N., having arrived still young in Tuscany around the middle of the 13th century, seems to revive the classicism of a somewhat archaeological taste proper to Apulian Romanesque sculpture through contact with the livelier accents of a distant or atavistic Etruscan tradition proper to the Romanesque plastic art of Tuscany. Nevertheless, from his earliest work, the Pisan pulpit, he shows that he knows the achievements of Gothic culture, which are more strongly accentuated in the Sienese pulpit, without this signifying a progress on his part along the path of art, which instead seems to manifest itself in the reliefs of the fountain of Perugia, where there appears almost a rethinking of the tradition whose language N. sums up in order to mold it, bend it, and adapt it to new demands. - See pl. CXVIII.

Emilio Lavagnino