Andrea Pisano

Italian scuptor

• Born: c. 1270-1290
• Birthplace: Pontedera, near Pisa (now in Italy)
• Died: c. 1348
• Place of death: Probably Orvieto, Papal States (now in Italy)

Bronze, unknown as a medium for sculpture in Florence before the 1330’, was brought to that city by Pisano, who made an important contribution to art with his baptistery door, which was to be the example to be matched and supremely surpassed during the Florentine Renaissance.

Early Life

Nothing certain is known of the early life of Andrea Pisano (ahn-DRAY-uh pee-SAHN-oh). His first appearance as a public figure does not occur until 1330, when he received the most important commission of his artistic career. The fine detail and design of his bronze sculptures suggest that he may have had training as a goldsmith. He may also have been trained by Giovanni Pisano, who was a sculptor who had, in turn, been trained by his father Nicola Pisano . The Pisanos, father and son, were natives of Pisa and made important contributions to the development of bronze sculpture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they were not related to Andrea Pisano, whose real name is, in fact, Andrea da Pontedera. The fact that he was generally called Pisano and emerges as a worker in bronze, a speciality of Pisan artists, suggests a Pisan connection.

In 1330, he gained the prestigious contract for a set of doors on the baptistery of the cathedral in Florence. Some reputation must have helped to capture this grand opportunity. It is likely that a competition took place, and it is known that Pisano’s wax model for the doors had to be redone. He must have been known for prior work of some quality, but nothing has been so identified, and his work in Florence was to be the major source of his modest fame.

Life’s Work

The baptistery is a separate building to the west of the cathedral in Florence. It may have been started as early as the fifth century and was probably annexed through the centuries. Local craft guilds took on themselves the responsibility for major religious buildings, and it was the Guild of Cloth Importers that sponsored the work on the baptistery. In 1329, it was decided that a set of bronze doors should be added to the south face of this octagonal, white-and-green marble building. The obvious subject for decoration of the door was the life of John the Baptist, and the upper series of the twenty-eight panels that Pisano designed for the door took John as their subject, and the lower set depicted Christian virtues. The individual scenes were enclosed by a border of Gothic design.

Both technically and aesthetically, Pisano’s door was a great success and provided the example and impetus for the later, even finer work of Lorenzo Ghiberti on two further doors, which were initiated at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The use of bronze, an extremely expensive material, had died out after the fall of the Roman Empire, and very few examples of Greek and Roman bronze have survived, given its frangible nature and the obvious temptation to melt it down for other uses. The example of Nicola Pisano and Giovanni Pisano in successfully bringing bronze back into the realm of religious sculpture was to mark the beginning of a renewed, flexible use of the metal that Andrea Pisano’s baptistery door instituted in Florence. It would be in Florence, in particular, where the use of bronze was to have a glorious future and where so much of the greatest art of the early Renaissance would be produced, after Pisano, by artists such as Ghiberti and Donatello.

However, Pisano brought something else to Florence. The earlier Pisanos, working with bronze in several cities throughout northern Italy, had also shown in their design an interest in adding to their Gothic roots the more realistic, more sensuous influences of classical sculpture, as well as delicate rhythms of French Gothic design. Giovanni, in particular, had strong connections to northern Gothic artists and seems to have had some considerable influence on Pisano. Working in the last century of the Gothic period, the Pisanos, and Andrea, in their wake, manifested the return to the celebration of the human body that had been central to classical art and was to reach elegant and celebratory expression in the early years of the Italian Renaissance.

Pisano is not, in fact, a Renaissance artist. He was a late Italian Gothic artist who manipulated with considerable success not only his heritage of medieval ideas and preconceptions but also other influences that come together for the first time in his own work. The restrained, flat style of Gothic art is present in the baptistery sculpture, and his use of space is unadventurous, but the compositions and modeling have a reality about them that suggests greater things to come. The influence of Giotto, the most important “link” figure between late Gothic and early Renaissance art, is also apparent in the harmonious juxtapositions, the sense of space in the panels. That is not surprising because Giotto was responsible for the adjacent campanile. An added dimension of Pisano’s work on the panels is his use of drapery, gracefully reminiscent of French Gothic influences that he may have picked up from Giovanni Pisano.

The Giotto influence is even more pronounced in Andrea Pisano’s own work on the campanile, where he was responsible for a series of reliefs, decorating the lower stories of the tower. There is some opinion that Giotto may have had a hand in the design of these scenes. Whatever the truth may be, it is obvious that the tender sonority and grace of these scenes, as well as the similar aura surrounding a series of marble figures that Pisano carved for niches on the tower, are examples of Giotto’s effect on Pisano, who was to succeed him as the supervisor of the campanile project when Giotto died in 1337.

Pisano remained in Florence until 1343 and may have left then simply because of the financial difficulties of that time, which forced the guilds to cut back on their social and religious projects. He seems to have returned to Pisa initially, but he soon moved to Orvieto, where he became the overseer of works at the cathedral. By this time his son, Nino Pisano, who was also a sculptor and would succeed him as overseer at the cathedral, was working with him. Andrea Pisano probably was a victim of the Black Death, which struck at the end of the 1330’. There seems to be little work after the Florence period that can be identified as that of Pisano, so it is to those two projects, the baptistery and the campanile, that his reputation is attached.

Significance

Pisano’s contribution to the history of art is a minor one, but it is not insignificant, in terms of either technique or aesthetic theory. His baptistery work was in itself proof positive of the potential for bronze as a legitimate medium for the new Humanism, and a close study of the technical mastery that he displayed in dealing with the John the Baptist theme reveals a capacity for the subtle manipulation of this difficult metal.

If he was less successful than Ghiberti in infusing psychological subtlety and dramatic breadth into the panels, it is important to remember how far he did go, how much emotional power he did express in his work. Ghiberti comes at the beginning of a new age, a new sensibility, and it has often been suggested that the Renaissance can be dated from the moment at which he presented his design for the second portal of the baptistery in 1401.

Yet the Renaissance did not suddenly spring fully formed from the work of Ghiberti; it had been brewing slowly, sometimes painfully, throughout the preceding century. In sculpture, particularly in bronze sculpture, the Renaissance can be seen working its way out of the aging Gothic sensibility in the work of the Pisanos. Nicola knew that the old ways, the static, flattened, restrained designs of the Gothic, however graced by northern influences, were not sufficient for him, and he was constantly circling the idea that the classical, heathen world holds the answer in its glorification of the human form. He passed that idea on to his son, and it passed, in turn, into the work of Andrea Pisano.

Andrea Pisano was, in short, that peculiar kind of artist who comes at the end of one tradition and who may easily fail if he does not possess, as Pisano did, the rare gift for assimilation and absorption of new ideas and the capacity to express the conjunction of the old and new in ways that not only make for art of outstanding quality but also for an example that will lead the greater artists of the new mode.

When Pisano was asked to design the first door for the baptistery, there was not an artisan in town who could work with bronze. It was necessary to import a bell caster from Venice to work with the artist. When Pisano left town, years later, the tradition was there in proof, in the great door and in his work on the campanile panels. Some years later, again with the financial support of the guild, the great sculptor Ghiberti followed the example set by Pisano and carried the bronze sculpture into the glories of the Renaissance.

Bibliography

Avery, Charles. Florentine Renaissance Sculpture. London: John Murray, 1982. A great aid to the untrained reader, beginning step-by-step with a group of chapters that move out of the late Gothic period into the Renaissance. Very good at putting the ubiquitous Pisanos in the right order in time, contribution, and influence. With generous illustration.

Moskowitz, Anita Fiderer. The Sculpture of Andrea and Nino Pisano. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. An examination of the sculpture created by Andrea Pisano and his son. Contains 350 illustrations, bibliography, and index.

Paolucci, Antonio. The Origins of Renaissance Art: The Baptistry Doors, Florence. New York: George Braziller, 1996. An examination of the bronze doors prepared at the Battistero di San Giovanni in Florence and of the works of Pisano and Lorenzo Ghiberti. Illustrations.

Pope-Hennessy, John. Italian Gothic Sculpture. 3 vols. 4th ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1996. Pisano makes sense only if he can be seen clearly as both a precursor of the Renaissance and as a late Gothic artist. Pope-Hennessy is one of the finest, most elegant commentators on both elements of Pisano’s gift.