Art historian Antonio Milone writes: “ […] The Baptistery is certainly the most international of Pisa’s Medieval buildings. For Pisa the building of the Baptistery is the central point of a new experimental phase. In the work-shops that take part, in the artists who work there, in the works of art that are created there, we find the peaks of the cultural triangulation that was typical of the most fecund periods of Medieval art, between Byzantium, Arabic and European civilisations”.
The Baptistery of Saint John was founded on August 15th of the Pisan year 1153 (1152 in the ordinary calendar), the day of the Patron Saint, dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption. It was not the first baptismal building erected in Pisa, as the remains of an earlier octagonal Baptistery dating back to the V-VI century lie underneath the Monumental Cemetery where they were unearthed in 1936.
The Baptistery stands as one of the cardinal points of the idea of the square that was coming of age in Pisa in the XII 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 Iohannis 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.
© 2004-2007 Opera della Primaziale Pisana - credits & copyright
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