Early Italian Art (1250-1400): Pisa and the renewal of Italian painting and sculpture

Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Pisa in Early Italian Art.

This was the second study day in the series and the first to focus on a particular city. In the morning we started by looking at the early painting from Pisa focusing on the Byzantine style of Giunta Pisano. We looked at the various styles of Crucifix and how they changed from the open eyed living Christ to the contorted dead figure and how this followed the theology of the time. We then moved on to the sculpture of Nicola Pisano and talked about how he studies Roman sarcophagi and worked out the techniques involved in them to produce wonderful pulpits. The lecturer has excellent pictures of the pulpits at Pisa and Sienna.

In the afternoon we moved on to Giovanni Pisano and looked at how he developed this style having worked with his father on the Sienna pulpit and how he developed the idea of figurative tombs and how this was taken up by another Pisan artist Tino di Camaino. We finished with Andrea Pisano and his doors for the Florence baptistery and roundels for the bell tower. I love the way these shows the crafts of the city at a level which would have been seen by all the people passing by who were probably engaged in these crafts.

Big shout out to the lecturer John Renner who coped so well with his laptop being stolen during the lunchbreak. Luckily for us he had his presentation on a memory stick and we were able to continue with a borrowed laptop but I’m not sure I would have been so calm after losing my machine and the information on it.