Few traces of the Roman city now exist. On the site of its temples rose churches, whose columns, and much of the material of which they were built, were filched from the earlier structures. Architraves were made from fragments of temples, while carved stones and inscriptions are built into so many walls that we cannot go far without seeing their beautiful patterns and bold lettering.
But all that we have to remind us of the many splendid imperial buildings of which we read, is one poor fragment of Thermae near the Porta Lucchese, and faint traces of an aqueduct outside it. Of the Circus Maximus, the Naumachia, the Forum and the theatres, the temple of Augustus, the arsenal and the great palace of Hadrian, which extended from the Piazza del Duomo to the Porta Lucchese, no traces remain.
Sculpture was perhaps the field in which Pisa was greatest. Art had lagged behind trade, and until the middle of the thirteenth century both painting and sculpture were at the lowest ebb.
Then there suddenly appeared a stranger, Niccolò, probably from distant Apulia, who transformed the latter into a living art, showing in his first work, the pulpit of the Baptistery, a perfect command over his art, a power of expressing emotion hitherto unknown, and of conceiving figures that had the grandeur of the old Romans, but were instinct with a new and a more vigorous life.
In spirit he was a pagan and ignored the gentle graces of Christianity, but he forced his pagan spirit into the service of the Christian Church. His Madonna looks like a suffering Roman matron, and the crucified Saviour like a gladiator, while his devils recall the grotesque masks of the ancients.
He was assisted and followed by his son Giovanni, sculptor and architect, who inherited his father’s vigour and strength, combined with romantic elements derived from the French – Gothic and a realism that tempered, without entirely superseding, his classical vein. Niccolò revived the sense of form, his influence affected sculpture throughout all Italy, and was only superseded by that of Donatello.
Giovanni’s personality is perhaps most strongly felt in the work of Giotto and of his contemporaries,but it spread all over Italy, and is very evident in the sculpture of Florence and of Siena.
Except Giunta Pisano and his followers, who painted grim crucifixes in the first half of the thirteenth century, and Traini, the fourteenth century painter of the S.Thomas Aquinas picture in the church of S. Caterina, Pisa has produced few painters ; and was obliged to summon artists from Siena or from Florence to adorn her walls.
( From the book “The Story of Pisa” by Janet Ross and Nelly Erichsen – Illustrade by Nelly Erichsen – London : J.M. Dent & Co, Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedfod Street Covent Garden, W.C. – 1909 )
territori del '900 