Nicola Pisano's Pisa Baptistery Pulpit: Baptism, Papal Orthodoxy, and Joachite Heresy

Abstract

Nicola Pisano's Pisa Baptistery Pulpit has garnered a vast amount of art historical attention. The artist's use of a classical style provides a starting point for any discussion of the Renaissance. However, the identification of the Pisa Baptistery Pulpit as primarily a proto-Renaissance work denies an accurate contextual analysis. Pisano's pulpit is a thirteenth-century Pisan monument whose primary importance is its relationship to the sacrament of baptism. Eloise Angiola in her essay "Nicola Pisano, Federigo Visconti, and the Classical Style in Pisa" provides the only comprehensive contextual analysis of the Pisa Baptistery Pulpit. This thesis seeks to clarify and expand her analysis. While Angiola offers a socio-political context for the imagery and iconography of the Pisa Baptistery Pulpit, I will place the monument within its religious context. Nicola Pisano's Pisa Pulpit can and should be understood as commentary on medieval theological understandings of the importance of baptism, as an orthodox argument supporting the Church's authority over the administration of the sacraments, and as a refutation of the heretical beliefs of the followers of the medieval ecstatic theologian, Joachim of Fiore. [From Introduction]