Description
The Church of Sant'Andrea is an ancient Romanesque parish church in the historic centre of Pistoia, narrow and very tall, with a façade banded in white and green marble. Inside it keeps the reason so many people come all this way: the pulpit carved by Giovanni Pisano, considered his masterpiece.
Giovanni Pisano's pulpit, finished in 1301, is a white marble hexagon more than four and a half metres high, held up by porphyry columns. Some rest on lions, one on a crouching atlas figure, and the central one on a winged lion, an eagle and a griffin.
Its five panels tell the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Last Judgement. The most striking is the Massacre of the Innocents: a whirl of mothers, soldiers and children, faces twisted with grief and fear. The figures seem to burst out of the marble, amid violent light and shadow.
At the corners stand prophets and sibyls. One of the sibyls turns abruptly, almost startled, towards the angel whispering the prophecy to her from behind: a gesture of a liveliness rare in the sculpture of the time.
At an altar on the left there is also a moving Crucifix by Giovanni Pisano, in front of a fresco of the Mourners. In the apse remains a God the Father in a mandorla held up by four angels, the last fragment of the frescoes commissioned in 1506.
Outside, it's worth looking up at the central portal. The architrave carved by Gruamonte and his brother Adeodato shows the Journey of the Magi, a rare subject in that position. Perhaps the road the church faced explains it: the Via Francigena of the pilgrims.
The carved capitals are by Master Enrico, and in the lunette above stands a small statue of Saint Andrew.
Its slender shape has a story. The church was originally much shorter; when it was brought to its present form in the 12th century, it was lengthened without being widened, and so gained its narrow, vertical proportions.
Giovanni Pisano was not a modest man. The Latin inscription running round the pulpit names the patron, and also hails the sculptor as the artist who “surpassed his father”, Nicola Pisano, creator of the pulpits of Pisa and Siena on which this one is modelled.
Don't miss
• Giovanni Pisano's pulpit.
• The Massacre of the Innocents.
• Giovanni Pisano's Crucifix.
• The architrave with the Journey of the Magi.
Did you know?
• The eagle holding the book on the pulpit is a copy: the original is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
• The church's organ was built in 1865 for another church, in Castellina di Serravalle Pistoiese.
Giovanni Pisano's pulpit, finished in 1301, is a white marble hexagon more than four and a half metres high, held up by porphyry columns. Some rest on lions, one on a crouching atlas figure, and the central one on a winged lion, an eagle and a griffin.
Its five panels tell the life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Last Judgement. The most striking is the Massacre of the Innocents: a whirl of mothers, soldiers and children, faces twisted with grief and fear. The figures seem to burst out of the marble, amid violent light and shadow.
At the corners stand prophets and sibyls. One of the sibyls turns abruptly, almost startled, towards the angel whispering the prophecy to her from behind: a gesture of a liveliness rare in the sculpture of the time.
At an altar on the left there is also a moving Crucifix by Giovanni Pisano, in front of a fresco of the Mourners. In the apse remains a God the Father in a mandorla held up by four angels, the last fragment of the frescoes commissioned in 1506.
Outside, it's worth looking up at the central portal. The architrave carved by Gruamonte and his brother Adeodato shows the Journey of the Magi, a rare subject in that position. Perhaps the road the church faced explains it: the Via Francigena of the pilgrims.
The carved capitals are by Master Enrico, and in the lunette above stands a small statue of Saint Andrew.
Its slender shape has a story. The church was originally much shorter; when it was brought to its present form in the 12th century, it was lengthened without being widened, and so gained its narrow, vertical proportions.
Giovanni Pisano was not a modest man. The Latin inscription running round the pulpit names the patron, and also hails the sculptor as the artist who “surpassed his father”, Nicola Pisano, creator of the pulpits of Pisa and Siena on which this one is modelled.
Don't miss
• Giovanni Pisano's pulpit.
• The Massacre of the Innocents.
• Giovanni Pisano's Crucifix.
• The architrave with the Journey of the Magi.
Did you know?
• The eagle holding the book on the pulpit is a copy: the original is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
• The church's organ was built in 1865 for another church, in Castellina di Serravalle Pistoiese.