Andrea Pisano, South doors, Baptistery of Saint John, Florence

0:00:00.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in Florence, and we’ve just walked by the gloriously beautiful baptistery, and we’ve walked into the Museum of the Works of the Cathedral to see the doors that were made for the baptistery, but which are now in the museum.

0:00:17.6 Dr. Beth Harris: There were three sets of doors for the east, north, and south of the baptistery in Florence. Now, the baptistery is this centrally important building in the life of the citizens of Florence. It’s beautifully decorated inside with mosaics, a place where the citizens of Florence were baptized. It’s dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. It’s the heart of Florence, and so these doors provided a bridge between the outside world and the inside sacred space of the baptistery.

0:00:50.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: These are enormous bronze doors. It’s hard to have a sense of the scale of these doors from images, but as I’m watching people walk through the museum, the doors are roughly three times the height of the visitors. This was an extremely expensive undertaking and one that pushed the limits of the technology of the era and recalls the great bronze doors of antiquity. I’m thinking specifically of the bronze doors of the Pantheon in Rome.

0:01:16.8 Dr. Beth Harris: So these were intended for the east doors of the baptistery. That is the doors that were directly across from the entrance to the cathedral. So we have to imagine that at just this time in Florence, they’re beginning to build their cathedral and beautifying this older building of the baptistery.

0:01:33.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: This is meant to be seen by people walking along the streets of the city. This is public art. This was a way of beautifying the city. It is a testament to the civic pride of Florence.

0:01:43.7 Dr. Beth Harris: So Andrea Pisano is commissioned by the Calimala, that is, the Guild of Wool Importers, one of the wealthiest and most powerful guilds in Florence.

0:01:54.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: The doors contain 28 quatrefoils, that is, these Gothic tracery frames that hold a depiction within. And 20 of those scenes, unsurprisingly, tell the story of the life of John the Baptist. The eight scenes below depict eight virtues.

0:02:10.3 Dr. Beth Harris: So these quatrefoils are essentially geometric shapes with four lobes, and they’re a kind of framing device that we see in Gothic cathedrals from the 12th or 13th century, for example, in Amiens in France. So it suggests perhaps that Pisano was aware of northern sculpture during this period.

0:02:30.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And in fact, some art historians conjecture that Pisano may have traveled to France, he may have even traveled to Germany. And the doors are read from left to right and from top to bottom. So let’s start at the top left. Here we see an angel appearing to Zechariah and announcing the birth of his son. Now this was a miracle because Zechariah and his wife were quite old.

0:02:50.4 Dr. Beth Harris: In the second scene, Zechariah is struck mute because he doesn’t believe the prophecy of the angel. And you can see he holds his hand up to his mouth, and another figure nearby uses one hand to point to Zechariah and the other to hold his hand up to his ear.

0:03:05.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And on the left, we see the visitation. Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, meeting with her relative, the Virgin Mary. And it’s a joyful moment. Both of them are pregnant. Elizabeth with John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary with the Christ child.

0:03:19.5 Dr. Beth Harris: In the next scene, we see the birth of Saint John the Baptist.

0:03:23.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And in the next scene, we see Zechariah writing the name of his newly born son, John. And because he’s told the name John by an angel, this heals him of his muteness and he can speak once again.

0:03:35.8 Dr. Beth Harris: In the next scene, we see the young Saint John in the desert.

0:03:39.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And then we see an adult Saint John preaching to the Pharisees.

0:03:43.1 Dr. Beth Harris: In the next scene, we see him announcing Christ. Saint John is a prophet. He recognizes Christ as the Messiah, as the Savior, and in a very characteristic gesture, points to Christ.

0:03:55.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And now we see John doing what he’s most known for, baptizing the disciples.

0:04:01.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And in the next scene, which we’ll come back to, we see him baptizing Christ himself.

0:04:06.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And moving then to the next door, we see John reprimanding Herod sitting next to Herodias, his wife.

0:04:11.6 Dr. Beth Harris: John is reprimanding him because Herod has married his brother’s wife.

0:04:16.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that leads us to the upper rightmost scene where John is led to prison.

0:04:21.2 Dr. Beth Harris: After that, we see the disciples visiting John in prison.

0:04:25.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And after visiting John in prison, the disciples then visit Jesus.

0:04:30.2 Dr. Beth Harris: After that, we see Salome dancing for King Herod. And as a reward for her dance, Herod says, I’ll give you anything you want. And Salome says, I want the head of Saint John the Baptist.

0:04:41.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: Herod follows through in the next scene, and we see John in the most vulnerable position with the executioner wielding his sword.

0:04:48.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And in the scene after that, we see John’s head being presented to King Herod.

0:04:54.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And then the head being presented to Herodias, Salome’s mother.

0:04:58.3 Dr. Beth Harris: Then we see Saint John’s body being transported to the grave.

0:05:02.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: And then finally, the entombment of John. These doors were intended to be instructive. They were intended to teach the stories to the passersby, to the common people of Florence.

0:05:13.1 Dr. Beth Harris: So in each of these scenes, Andrea Pisano made the narrative, the story, really clear.

0:05:20.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Let’s look more carefully at one of these scenes of John baptizing Christ.

0:05:24.7 Dr. Beth Harris: The biblical passage reads, “At the moment when he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens open and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And a voice spoke from heaven, Thou art my Son, my Beloved, on thee my favor rests.” We see on the left a kneeling angel holding Christ’s tunic. Christ is frontal and in the center. And on the right, we see Saint John the Baptist pouring water onto Christ. And around his head, we can see a halo.

0:05:54.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: And the two figures facing towards Christ, focusing our attention. And from above, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descends. Another pointer down to Christ. The bronze actually has sort of ripples along it that seem to almost wrap over Christ’s legs as if they were a light blanket.

0:06:15.4 Dr. Beth Harris: This very simplified setting that helps to focus our attention on the figures.

0:06:20.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: But also a great degree of detail. You can see the careful linear quality of the hair, of the rough garment that John wears, this hair shirt. And for example, you can see at the bottom the fringe of John’s garment, but it wraps around to the other side of his legs, so there’s a kind of dimensionality that the artist has taken the time to express.

0:06:43.0 Dr. Beth Harris: These figures are all in very high relief, and Christ’s right arm especially comes out toward us into our space.

0:06:51.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: So the set of doors were seen as a tour de force, as exceptionally successful, so much so that they functioned as the model for two more sets of doors, enormously expensive and triumphal expressions of Florence’s wealth and its technological and artistic achievements.

0:07:08.4 Dr. Beth Harris: So about a hundred years later, the Calimala commissions Ghiberti to do another set of doors. These tell the stories of the life of Christ, and they employ once again figures set in these quatrefoil shapes.

0:07:23.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: But Ghiberti gets a second commission because of the success of his first set of doors to create what Michelangelo dubbed the Gates of Paradise because they’re so beautiful.

0:07:33.2 Dr. Beth Harris: And this incredible achievement by Andrea Pisano bringing together the narrative clarity, the emotional power of Giotto’s figures together with Gothic art from France here in the doors of the baptistery in Florence.

[music]

This work at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo

Watch our video on Ghiberti’s east doors (Gates of Paradise)

Anita Fiderer Moskowitz, “The Framework of Andrea Pisano’s Bronze Doors: Some Possible Non-Tuscan Sources,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, volume 2, number 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 1–4.

John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy, fourth edition (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2020).

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