"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".
Art historian Pietro Toesca feels the strength and harmony that the cathedral conveys. The building is the fruit of an extraordinary human talent, supported by a deep civic awareness and a religious faith capable of shaping a civilisation. And a cathedral does not appear as if by magic, it is a goal, a deliberate achievement.
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 quarter of the XII century, when Bonanno’s bronze leaves were placed on the central door, which were later destroyed by the devastating fire of 1595, after which many of the destroyed works were replaced and a vast decorative plan was started.
The outer facing of the Cathedral is decorated in alternating black and white shades in stripes of Arab influence and a massive use of reused materials from Roman monuments that emphasised the greatness of the city of Pisa, "altera Roma". Such decorative features as lozenges, a bronze griffon of Islamic manufacture on top of the roof, and other Oriental-looking features, such as the elliptic-plan dome, rooted in the Mediterranean culture of the city and the architect, add shape and colour to a monument that is as much extraordinarily new as it is ancient.
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.
Rich and sumptuous are the decorations in the Cathedral of Pisa, the development of which is related to an often-troubled history marked by often-calamitous events that culminated in the fire of 1595. The only remains of the important commissions that completed the decoration of the Cathedral in the early 14th century are the mosaics on the apsidal conch - where Cimabue painted the figure of Saint John the Evangelist (1302 ca.) – the new pulpit (1302-1310) by Giovanni Pisano and the disjoined sepulchral monument to Emperor Henry VII (1315), which used to be at the centre of the apse, and about whose construction the project Un monumento per l'Imperatore tried to shed light.
