Episode 52 – Siena: Cathedral Pulpit by Nicola Pisano

Buongiorno! I’m Dr Rocky Ruggiero, join me in Rebuilding The Renaissance and making art in history come to life.

Welcome to the Rebuilding The Renaissance Podcast, your guide to the art and history of Italy from the glory of Rome to the magnificence of the Renaissance. And now here’s your host, Dr Rocky Ruggiero.

Buongiorno everyone. Today’s podcast is a sequel to an earlier podcast about the pulpit that was carved by Nicola Pisano and is located in the Baptistery in Pisa. Because today we’re talking about a pulpit that was carved by Nicola Pisano, but is located in the cathedral of Siena instead. In fact, the two pulpits were carved about five years apart. The one in Pisa Baptistery was carved in 1260 and then five years later in 1265 Nicola Pisano carving for the open offer, the works committee of the cathedral of Siena instead. And when you look at the two pulpits side by side, what you realize is that Nicola Pisano was in fact an artist, very much conscious of his artistic surroundings. In other words, the pulpit in Pisa Baptistry is much more simple in its design. We’ve talked about how the figures were monumental and how they were actually just a few figures in each of the panels to make them quite user friendly and readable.

Instead, the relief panels in Siena Cathedral are much more crowded, much more busy. The figures are smaller in scale so that Pisano can fit more of them in each of the scenes. And the reason I believe he does this, is because of course the architectural setting that is Siena Cathedral, which is one of the prime examples of Gothic architecture. Which I jokingly described as architectural philosophy of more is never enough in terms of decoration that we talked about that horror vacuum. By this sense that technically you need to cover every square inch of wall and ceiling and floor surface with decoration. And so the idea that the simple style of the Pisa Baptistry would have looked completely out of place. And so Pisano essentially adapting to his new architectural surroundings instead. Now, one of the other differences between the two pulpits is that the Pisa Baptistry pulpit is hexagonal. It is six sided, whereas the one in Siena Cathedral is octagonal, eight sided.

And like the one in Pisa, one of the sides of the Siena Cathedral pulpit is open to allow access to the priest actually then step up onto the platform within the walls of the pulpit itself. The seven remaining sides are adored with marbled relief sculptures depicting episodes from the life of Jesus Christ, so it is also New Testament in its subject matter. And the first panel is just to the right hand side of that elaborate staircase that you see depicting two scenes, actually four if we were going to actually count all the smaller scenes as well. Beginning in the upper left of the panel instead of the annunciation, which was the subject of which we began the Pisa Baptistry story. Here instead we have the visitation. This is the episode where the Virgin Mary went to inform her older cousin Elizabeth, that she was expecting only to discover that Elizabeth was expecting as well and would eventually give birth to a man named John the Baptist.

And so the scene is expressed here by Pisano with the younger woman greeting the older woman, just to the right of which we have this large reclining figure who looks very much like the one we saw in Pisa Baptistry, that large matriarchal figure of the Virgin Mary postpartum in time. And inspired clearly by ancient Roman and a trust skin sarcophagi islets, where of course the deceased was always represented as if banqueting. And so in that same kind of reclining position propped up on their arms and that’s exactly what you see here. But the Virgin’s smaller than she was in Pisa. And the reason is because there’s a lot more going on around her. Just above Mary’s left leg, you’ll see Christ straitjacketed in his swaddle, in clothes, in his crib. And directly above him, the heads of the ox and the donkey, which are perhaps the two most iconic symbols of any nativity scene.

And so Mary has just given birth, Christ in his crib, born with an ox and a donkey. And then to your lower left of Mary you’ll see this child sitting in a small bath or vase. And this is the bathing of Jesus Christ, which was not visible. In fact, many of the gaps, many of the missing pieces in the Pisa Baptistry pulpit are fortunately conserved here in Siena. So you could actually kind of fill in the blanks literally. And so this is Jesus receiving his bath. And so we have visitation, we have Mary in the center, essentially a motivity just above and then the bath of Jesus to the lower left hand side. And just like he did in Pisa, the composition is one that pushes our eyes to the lower right hand corner where we have these three Rams bowing their heads. Moving our eyes into that furthest lowest right hand where we have a goat positioned so that its body is parallel to the lower frame or part of the frame and its head instead turning it 90 degrees.

So we have essentially run out of space. We have nowhere else to go but to the next relief panel. So there is that same kind of page turning technique as I like to describe it that we saw in Pisa. That is a sculptor, an artist more generally who is very much concerned with the fluidity of his narrative. And so visually giving us cues as to how we should read and we begin reading the next panel in the lower left end corner. So essentially we finished reading the first scene in the lower right, we begin reading the next panel in the lower left and so this idea of continuity. And the subject of the panel is the adoration of the manger, the three Kings, the three wise men, the three manger who come to bring their gifts and adore Jesus Christ. And so in the lower left hand corner we have the three Kings on horseback.

And the exceptional rendering of movement in this scene is quite startling considering again that we’re in the middle of the 13th century. We have these horses’ moving their hooves raised up. We get this general sense of excitement and chaos through the gestures of these rearing dogs that are underneath. A very intuitive reaction for an animal obviously when there is general confusion. In fact, one of the things I adore doing in the classroom with the advantage of course of PowerPoint is to show those trotting horses in Pisano’s panel and put them side by side to the horses from one of the relief sculptures from the Arch of Titus in Rome carved in the first century after Christ. And it’s uncanny how close Pisano comes in the 13th century to capturing that classical idea of movement that was so celebrated in the ancient world. And perhaps even more surprisingly Pisano could not have seen that relief sculpture because much of the Arch of Titus was actually underground until archeology uncovered it in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

But it shows you again just how close Pisano was and that what the Renaissance was about was essentially achieving that same level of reality and naturalism in the art work. Now as you’re looking at the lower portion of the scene, suddenly to the right of the horses, we have a couple of camels, a part of the caravan, obviously of the manger, and then suddenly there’s a horse whose head is turning and facing the opposite direction. Almost a foreshadowing of what is going to happen, kind of physical foreshadowing. Because then all of a sudden the heads turn again and are seen from the right hand side. And then the last figure in that lower level looking up to the left, which is essentially where the artist wants us to go. Because almost lined perfectly with his eyes is the straight edge of a platform. It’s really the only architectural element in this area of the paddle.

And what the artist wants us to do is to follow that line up to the upper left hand corner where we have this big horse Heinie. Now it’s not the most elegant thing in the world, but that big curvilinear bum does its job and essentially turning your eye. The artist Pisano wants us now to move up to the top level, so we follow that curvature of the horseback side. And now we have the last few figures who are part of that caravan and that more traditional sequential arrangement of the youngest King standing, the middle King genuflecting and the old King bowing down reverently in front of this cabbage patch. Christ child is quite chubby and cute sitting on the lap of mama the Virgin Mary, both of whom were being watched dutifully by an angel with a spear just to their left hand side. And so the idea essentially of moving from the lower left all the way to the upper right hand corner of the panel.

And from this point we have nowhere else to go, but again into the next panel. So all of these panels moving very elegantly from one to the next. Okay. Now the next panel has two subjects in one scene. The one in the lower left, in other words, the left hand side of this panel shows the presentation at the temple with the architectural backdrop of the temple. There, the priest Simeon, the Virgin Mary giving Jesus over in this kind of symbolic gesture. And then in the very middle of the panel, very bottom, there’s this sort of huddled figure. It’s a male figure was huddled down, kind of crouching down, wrapped up in his own rob, and that figure is Joseph, right? Joseph playing a very important role in the entirety of the composition of the panel.

In the sense that the subject is the dream of Joseph. Okay, the New Testament says that Joseph is told in a dream by an angel to get the Holy family out of Dodge because danger was imminent. But at the same time his physical reality, this kind of roundedness of Joseph is what essentially moves your eye from the subject in the left hand side of the panel, to the subject on the right hand side of the panel. It’s almost like the physical spine of a book that moves you from left to right. And that’s exactly what Pisano was doing with this rounded form and that rounded form, which in the story of course is Joseph’s dream, then leads us into the second half of the same panel where we have the flight into Egypt. We see the Virgin Mary on donkey back carrying the Christ child being led to safety away from the wrath of Herod, which will manifest itself in the next scene.

And that next scene is the massacre or the slaughter of the innocence. He gives an entire rectangular panel over to this brutal subject of these children being massacred. The story goes, Herod had slyly asked the three Kings to come back and inform him of where Jesus was located so that he too might go and pay homage, when in reality Herod was paranoid that this newborn King would be a threat to his power. So it was planned from the very beginning was to kill Christ. Well, after a couple of years, Herod came to grips with the fact that the mangers were not going to go back and inform him of Jesus’s location. So he decided to deal with the problem in this sweeping act of infanticide, ordering the slaughter of all children under the age of two. So this is the screenplay with which Pisano is working in his depiction of the scene.

And you look at the panel, Herod is actually in the upper left hand corner, being essentially the figure who’s responsible for all of this. You see this gesture of his right hand pointing down and he’s pointing at this woman who’s just above center of the panel, who’s pulling her hair with both of her hands. This universal gesture of grief and dismay. And just below her, another woman carrying the corpse of an infant child. And so immediately the tone of just violence and desperation in the scene. This woman holding the corpse of the child is flamed left and right by these soldiers who are driving their daggers through these infant bodies. And the curious thing from an artistic point of view is that those two figures are in fact the same figure shown from front and rear simultaneously. And so Nicola Pisano essentially transforming relief sculpture into sculpture in the round. This is a gesture of bravado, of virtuosity.

To the left of the soldier driving his dagger through the infant. Seeing from the front, you’ll see this struggle. A woman pulling her child away and an old man or soldier technically, reaching out for the leg of the child, to the left of which is the small child was kind of crouching, it’s such a spot on representation of kind of intuitive reaction of a child when scared, when frightened. And again, it shows us that Pisano is looking very hard at the real world into the left. Then these two figures are kind of oblivious to all of the violence that’s taking place, a woman with a child simply sitting on her lap. Right now, let’s go all the way back to the other side. That same soldier shown from front back in the middle. The one with his back to us, just to the right of him is this female figure sitting down with the corpse of a child across her lap.

And of course this image of the woman mourning her dead child is prefiguring the Pieta, that is a woman mourning the death of her adult son that is in the persons of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. And so the idea of alluding to a future biblical event. And then way at the top of the scene, so just about this sort of prefigured Pieta, you’ll see this interesting struggle between these three characters, a soldier reaching for children, a woman straight arming him trying to protect one who’s holding onto her front and another sitting on her shoulder and head. It really is just a moving and graphic and emotional scene and the overall organization of it. I mean there is no center, there is no clear horizontal or vertical image. And so just overall spontaneity reminding us very much even with like a last judgment scene or what have you, is something which hadn’t really been achieved since ancient Roman times and from one scene of violence to another.

The next panel Pisano depicts the crucifixion. Now worth mentioning that the cross upon which Christ is crucified in this scene is a Y, like the letter Y shaped cross, which I imagine is easier to insert into this rectangular space. And Jesus’s body now, the muscularity that was so prominent in the Pisa Baptistry pulpit is not present here, Christ is sort of slimmed down. But what has increased is the physiological reality of what it means for someone to die of crucifixion because we can clearly see the strain through Jesus’s arms and shoulders, more importantly, the stretching of his torso. We discussed in an earlier podcast how that when one is crucified, it is actually asphyxiation that kills one and you can clearly see it here through the con cavity of Christ’s stomach. Where essentially his body has reached the utmost of its stretching potential. And what is perhaps most disturbing about the crucifixion scene is this unnatural dropping of Christ’s head.

It sort of tilts to the side and he has this open mouth, his parted lips. You could almost hear the asthmatic wheezing, gasping of Christ as he’s struggling to get air into his lungs. Because of course, when you’re crucified, you’d have to pull yourself up in order to breathe and you can imagine the pain that you would inflict upon yourself with nails piercing your hands and feet. We know exactly what moment of the story this is because just to the right of Christ, there is a figure lifting a sponge upon the edge of a stick and Christ, according to the gospels at the very end says, I am thirsty. Give me drink. And they mocked him further by dipping a sponge into a bowl of the vinegar, and bringing it up to those cracked and bleeding lips, you can imagine how pleasant a sensation that was. And right after this is when Jesus then commends his soul to God. In other words, the moment just before he dies, and so this is the very end of the story.

To the right of the crucifix, we have the Sanhedrin, those members of the council of elders who had insisted upon Christ crucifixion and who now cringe in fear at the horror and reality of what they’ve done. And you can recognize them through these permanented beards, which is exactly what Pisano had done in the Pisa pulpit as well. And then to the left of the cross, we have the good people and he have John the beloved apostle who’s clearly crying. His head tilts down, he’s rubbing one of his eyes, his mouth pulled back as well. And you may remember that I celebrated Giotto as the earliest painter to communicate emotion through facial expression, while Pisano again doing this about a half century before Giotto ever would. And to the left of John, we have the fainting Virgin Mary. Now very interesting innovation. And I adore when you watch artists evolve.

Because you may remember back to the fainting Virgin in the Pisa Baptistry pulpit, where essentially her lower half was perfectly vertical and her upper half was horizontal. There was a 90 degree turn in her hip. Here instead you see her fainting in a proper physiological way. Somewhere between Pisa and Siena, Nicola Pisano saw someone faint because Mary’s legs here go to jelly. You can see her right knee pushing up against her robe and then her body drifting off to the right hand side, her arms going limp, and then the figures around her just jumping to assist her and keep up her unconscious form. It really is an incredibly accurate rendering of what it is when someone loses consciousness. And that is exactly what Pisano is showing. A woman’s so overcome by grief that she simply faints, she simply loses consciousness and it almost physiological denial over what’s happening.

And then above the group, another moving figure who brings a cloth or handkerchief up to her eye to wipe away those tears. And so a physical yet an emotional crucifixion in Pisano’s rendering. And the last two panels, quite an ingenious solution here because Pisano has incorporated two panels into a single subject. The panel immediately after the crucifixion is 50% of a last judgment scene. And what you see is rows of men and women looking up to their left hand side. And what they’re looking at is the figure of Jesus Christ who is actually positioned on the buttress between that panel and the next. And the figure of Jesus, who has a new torso, but his robed right hand raised up, left-hand extended downward, is Jesus in judgment.

So this previous panel with all these figures looking up gratefully are the figures in heaven. This is Paradiso, these are these select few will be allowed into heaven. You see regular people, you see clergy, you see men, you see women. And at the bottom of the scene you see these figures coming back from the dead, the so called resurrection of the flesh. Many of them in semi-nude appearance. In other words, this idea of coming back and using it as an excuse to showcase the human form, female and male down below. And then to your right of Jesus Christ is an entire panel dedicated to hell. And it’s organized essentially in half. The left hand side of the panel is this kind of gray zone, if you will, where essentially there’s a kind of sorting out or sifting out amongst the soul. So in the top level you see these two angels who are huddled together, literally taking off on their fingers.

Okay, we got this guy, we got this guy, kind of going through their checklist to make sure that they of course have grouped up and collected everyone they should and sort of them up in the proper place, whether it be heaven or hell. Just below them, we have these figures looking up at Christ and these are figures who are moving over to the other side. In other words, they’re coming from the side of the damned over to the side of the saved. And then below them you see this figure who is actually a fryer or a monk. He’s wearing a habit and he has his hands folded in this kind of pleading gesture as he pleads with an angel to be let go. You can almost hear the words, please don’t send me down there. And as this exchange is taking place just to the right of him, there’s a man being dragged down by a demon, but he’s actually taking the time to eaves drop into the conversation of the man with the angel so that if it works, perhaps he might plead his case with the angel as well.

But this is the beginning essentially of the desperation. You can clearly see this schism kind of moving diagonally down from the upper right to the lower left, dividing that kind of area, that gray zone as I described it from the area of hell. At the very top, there’s an angel pushing a sinner down into this hell area, which is characterized by just general confusion and chaos. You’ll see demons shoving sinners into the mouths of bigger beasts. You see these kind of monstrous faces and the lower right hand corner, the figure of Lucifer himself with these claws and these kind of beast head and these fur, almost Seder type legs cramming a woman, so female nudity, you can clearly see her breasts as she’s being shoved into the mouth of this larger wolf type creature by Lucifer’s right hand. With his left he’s pushing down another sinner who in turn is pushing down another below him.

To the immediate left of Lucifer, there is a sinner who’s left arm is being devoured entirely by a demon. And then in the very center of that lowest level, almost a surprising detail of this incredibly sensual and elegant female back. It’s nude, there’s nothing covering it. You see just the top of her buttocks and it’s so out of place amongst the horrors of hell, obviously just dominating the rest of the scene. And instead here Pisano throwing in this elegant feminine form, which in my opinion can compete with any of Degas famous bathers or ballerinas in the late 19th century works that you see. And the fact that I’m associating a mid 13th century sculpture with 19th century painting is absurd, but spot on. And when you see the figure, you’ll see exactly what I mean. That an artist essentially has gone so far beyond just naturalism in his artwork, that there’s room for subjectivity.

There’s room for this personalized touch of an almost modern eye in the work of a medieval sculpture, that is Nicola Pisano as I describe him over and over again, perhaps the most underrated artist in the history of art whose work is just dumbfounding in the context of when it was created in the 13th century. Just light years ahead of what any other artist, sculpture or painter or architect alike was doing. Okay, so we end our discussion here of the Siena Cathedral pulpit and in our next podcast what we’ll do is begin discussing iconography. Yes, that big scary word. And we’re not going to break it down to its parts. We’ll be talking specifically about the iconography of saints. This is a lecture that I give, I’m transforming into a podcast which I call tongue in cheekshly, saints, symbols and spaghetti. We’ll be talking about certain saints, their specific symbols or iconography, how we recognize these saints, but also throwing in a couple of culinary dishes, believe it or not, that are associated with saints and they’re oftentimes gruesome stories as well.

So stay tuned for more in my next podcast, and we’ll continue our Adventure Through The Renaissance.