The ‘Miracle Square’ in Pisa was definitely worth experiencing.
The idea was the four steps of religious life: baptism, church, cemetery (burial) and the ‘stairway to heaven’.
However, since they are all so close to the water there is nothing really to support the foundations. The tower, the most concentrated mass on the smallest space, slanted first but all the other buildings are also all a little askew.
The Baptistery stands as one of the cardinal points of the idea of the square that was coming of age in Pisa in the XIl century; what was taking shape was a space that gave priority to the front view of the façade of the Cathedral, the axial character of which was now set off by such a meaningful building as the Baptistery, built along the same lines.
The reason for building such a fascinating as well as mysterious building was certainly the will to provide the Cathedral with a worthy addition: a Baptistery that, because of its location, size, materials and style, would be in tune with the impressive and typical building that existed before it. These might be the terms in which the holders of the local ecclesiastic and civil powers, who had expressly set up a board, the “Opera ecclesiae Sancti lohannis Baptiste”, had expressed their wishes to architect Deotisalvi, whose figure remains in the dark and can hardly be reconstructed as there are no written sources about him. The inscription “Deotisalvi magister huius operis”, “Deotisalvi is the author of this work”, found on a pillar of the Baptistery, claims authorship of the building.
According to the same source, in 1163 it was ordered that on the first day of the month every family of Pisa should pay one denaro to continue the building of the monument. This is evidence of the city’s contribution to the monument, as is also proven by the fact that the installation of the columns was organised and contributed to by the city neighbourhoods.
It is the largest Baptistery in Italy: 107.24 metres in circumference, while the wall at the bottom is two metres 63 cm wide, its height 54 metres 86 centimetres. The dome is covered in red tiles on the west side and in lead slabs on the east side.
The big cylinder is surrounded, like the Cathedral, by arcades on pillars and, like the Cathedral, it is made of white marble edged with grey. Inside, eight monolithic columns compete for height with the Cathedral, alternating with four pillars and outlining a central area that accommodates the octagonal baptismal font by Guido da Como (1246), with Nicola Pisano’s pulpit next to it (1260). A women’s gallery covered by a ringed vault looks out onto the central area with a series of large round arches. The covering is composed of a double dome, the inner one shaped like a dodecagonal truncated pyramid, the outer one in the shape of a hemispherical vault, with a smaller dome on top. It is precisely the unique architectural design of the covering that gives the Baptistery of Pisa exceptional acoustics. It can be heard every 30 minutes when the security guards perform a series of vocal intonations.
“The cathedral stands, secluded everywhere, in the vast, silent expanse of greenery enclosed by the crenellated walls of the Medieval town, that in such seclusion erected admirable monuments of its past life. In that isolation, the snow-white cathedral, visible from everywhere, looks as if it had been shaped and completed by a vast, consistent creative gesture”. (Pietro Toesca)
The importance attached by the people of Pisa to the building of the Cathedral can be read in the epigraphs that are still embedded on the façade: the tombstone of bishop Guido, who began building it, funded by the fabulous loot that the people of Pisa took from the pillage of Palermo in 1063, the tombstone of Buschetto, the first ingenious architect, in which the building is called “a temple of snow-white marble”, and the one that tells of the anti-Saracen battles of Reggio, Sardinia and Bona, in Africa.Founded in 1064 and consecrated with great pomp on September 26th 1118, the Cathedral was built in two stages, one by architect Buscheto, who created the original layout with the basilican body with four aisles and one nave, a transept with one nave and two aisles, and the dome on the cross vault, and one by Rainaldo, who extended the building and the façade.
The building was not finally completed until the last quar ter of the XII century, when Bonanno’s bronze leaves were placed on the central door. This famous masterpiece was lost, along with other important works of art, in the devastating fire of 1595.
Inside, the nave is edged by two rows of monolithic columns made of granite from the Isle of Elba, flanked by four aisles separated by smaller colonnades with large women’s galleries on top, covered by cross vaults and looking out onto the nave through some double-lancet and four-lancet windows.
The nave is covered by a wooden coffered ceiling that in the XVII century replaced the original exposed trusses.
Of the rich and sumptuous decoration prior to the fire, remain the mosaics on the apsidal conch – where Cimabue made the figure of Saint John the Evangelist (1302 ca.) – the pulpit (1302-1310) by Giovanni Pisano, the dismembered sepulchral monument to Emperor Henry VII (1315), which used to be at the centre of the apse, and important examples of painting and wooden inlay of the Renaissance period.
The Cemetery is the last monument on Piazza del Duomo, its long marble wall flanking the northern boundary and completing its shape. It was founded in 1277 to accommodate the Roman sarcophagi that until then were scattered all around the Cathedral and were reused to bury local noblemen. This is how one of the oldest Christian Medieval architectures for the devotion of the dead came into being.
During the fourteenth century, as the construction took shape, the inner walls were embellished by wonderful frescoes about Life and Death, created by the two great artists of the time, Francesco Traini and Bonamico Buffalmacco, who seem to stage the sermons declaimed in town by the Dominican Cavalca or the frightening views of Dante’s Comedy; reference to it is most evident in the Triumph of Death and in the Last Judgement painted by Buffalmacco, who is also known as the character of some of Boccaccio’s stories. The cycle of frescoes goes on well into the fourteenth century with the Stories of Pisan Saints by Andrea Bonaiuti, Antonio Veneziano and Spinello Aretino and the Stories of the Ancient Testament, started by Taddeo Gaddi and Piero di Puccio and finished in the mid-15th century by the Florentine Benozzo Gozzoli, along the northern wall.
Since the sixteenth century, the Cemetery has sheltered the sepulchres of the most prestigious lecturers of the local University and the members of the Medici family, who ruled over the city at that time and are also hinted at by the characters of the Biblical scenes frescoed on the shorter walls.
The monument was to become the Pantheon of local mem-ories: not only of the local people or families but also of the glorious classical and Medieval past of the city. The building began to be used as a museum, its walls engraved with Roman epigraphs and the sarcophagi relocated to the corridors, acting now as valuables documents of history and art.
The use of the building as a museum established itself in the early nineteenth century when the Cemetery became one of Europe’s first public museums. In the years in which Napoleon decreed that many works of art should be taken away from the churches and taken to France, Carlo Lasinio, appointed Curator of the Cemetery by Maria Luisa, Queen of Etruria, collected amidst its frescoed walls the sculptures and paintings that were in the suppressed churches and convents of the city. Other works came from the Cathedral and the Baptistery, along with remains from the local archaeological sites and the antiques markets. In the meantime, commemorative and funerary monuments dedicated to the city notables continued to be built in the corridors that were renamed galleries.
Apart from its extremely famous inclination that really seems to defy the laws of statics, the Tower of the Cathedral is a very unusual building and one of a kind, because of the high historical and artistic value of its forms and because of its peculiar location, within that vast and equally unique area that is the Piazza dei Miracoli. The building is located far from the Cathedral, between the apsidal area and the southeastern section of the transept of the Cathedral. This is an unusual location – usually, a tower would be erected near the façade or along one side of the church – although this is not the only case, as it can be found in other complexes in town and in other Italian buildings. The current building, the result of a time-consuming construction work that was restored several times over the centuries, mostly to reduce the risk that it might collapse as a consequence of its remarkable inclination, is composed of a cylindrical stone body surrounded by open galleries with arcades and pillars resting on a bottom shaft, with the belfry on top. The central body is composed of a hollow cylinder with an outer facing of shaped pillars in white and grey San Giuliano limestone, an interior facing, also made of textured verrucana stone, and a ring-shaped stone area in between. This stone area accommodates a winding staircase with 293 steps leading up to the sixth open gallery, where the inner shaft is closed by a vault with a central hole to let light in, providing access to the belfry on top and, in the lower mezzanine floors, to the open galleries. The six open galleries resting on the bottom shafts, with this one and the belfry, divide the tower into eight segments that are called orders. The lower one is enriched by a round of blind arcades placed on half columns that include, under the arcade, a diamond-shaped compass inlaid with polychrome marble, with a raised rosette in the middle. The solid walls interrupted by the openings of some narrow single-lancet windows and, westwards, by the only entrance door: a rectangular area framed by a lintel. Above the lintel, a crescent-shaped arch with an inlaid archivolt rests on two capitals as a continuation of the jambs, forming a shrine containing the bust of a 14th-century Virgin with Child. On the sides of the door, some friezes decorated with animals and monstrous figures and the unusual figures of some ships (the Port of Pisa?) frame the commemorative epigraph of the foundation of the building.
