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Updated: May 28, 2025
Thus in a moment this Southerner transforms the rude art of his time here in Tuscany, the work of Bonannus, for instance, the carvings of Biduinus, and the bas-reliefs at San Cassiano, with the faint memory of Rome that lingered like a ghost in the minds of men, that already had risen in the laws and government of the cities, in the desire of men here in Pisa, for instance, for liberty, and that was soon to recreate the world.
After the beautiful convention of Byzantium had passed away, and Gruamone and Adeodatus had carved at Pistoja, Biduinus at S. Cassiano, Robertus at Lucca, Bonamicus and Bonannus at Pisa, and Guido da Como again at Pistoja, in the work of Niccolò Pisano at Pisa we come upon the first thought of the Renaissance, the reliefs of the pulpit in the Baptistery, in which the Middle Age seems to have passed over the work of Antiquity almost like a caress.
Consider, then, those horses' heads in the Adoration of the Magi, or the high priest in the Presentation, and then compare them with the rude work of Bonannus on the south transept door of the Duomo; no Pisan, certainly no Tuscan, could have carved them thus in high relief with the very splendour of old Rome in every line.
It is like a lily leaning in the wind, it is like the slanting horn of an unicorn, it is like an ivory Madonna that the artist has not had the heart to carve since the ivory was so fair. Begun in 1174, it was designed by Bonannus. He made it all of white marble, which has faded now to the colour of old ivory.
On the corners of the church and on the corners of the nave are figures of saints, while above all, on the cusp of the façade, stands Madonna with Her Son in Her arms. The door in the south transept is by Bonannus, whose great doors were destroyed in 1595. Within, the church is solemn and full of light.
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