Day Trip to Pisa

As part of my Renaissance art tour of Italy, I had to make one stop outside of Florence. Although Pisa is famous for it's tower, it has two very important proto-Renaissance statues (that sounds extremely academic doesn't it).

Pisa's Field of Miracles, as the Duomo complex is known, houses the first male and female nude statues in Western Art in over 1,000 years. After the Roman Empire fell and art plunged into the dark ages with the rest of civilization, it was a big no-no to show an unclothed body. (We see this again in the late 1500s when a Pope decides he doesn't like all of Michelangelo's naked bodies on the Sistine Chapel and hires a "pants painter" to cover up all of the naughty parts.)

It wasn't until Nicolo Pisano was hired to carve the pulpit of the Pisa Baptistry in 1260 that we see the first significant-sized statue of a male nude since Roman antiquity. He carved the figure of Daniel (from the Daniel and the lions story) but he looks an awful lot like Hercules. That's probably because he couldn't get anyone to pose for him and there were a lot of old Roman carvings laying around the church with mythological figures that he likely copied. Interestingly, Nicolo put his naked Daniel/Hercules at the back of the pulpit - I guess so he wouldn't scandalize the congregation.


Nicolo's son, Giovanni was also a sculptor. Fifty years later he gets the commission for the pulpit in Pisa's Duomo. A pioneer like his father, Giovanni carves an even bigger nude, this time female, that happens to look exactly like a famous Venus statue from the early Romans. His naked woman represents the virtue modesty and it, too, is kind of tucked away where you can't see her.

This father and son duo were ahead of their times. We don't really start seeing nude statues again for another 150 years when the Renaissance really gets started.

View from top of Pisa's Leaning Tower

Back then Pisa was a huge naval power. They cut in a port into their city like the Houston Ship Channel and had a lot of trade with the nearby Arab cities.