The Phaedra Sarcophagus

In the year 1076, a woman named Beatrice died and was laid to rest in Pisa, in the cemetery of the Cathedral.  Her coffin was an ancient Roman sarcophagus, carved nearly a thousand years before, probably in Rome.  I don’t know what happened to the original occupant.  In any case, Beatrice took up residence there, and her daughter Matilda had her mother’s name inscribed on the base, where you can still see it today.  It’s in the Campo dei Miracoli in Pisa, where they keep the Leaning Tower, the Pisa Cathedral, and the great Cathedral Baptistery; but to see Beatrice’s tomb, you must go instead to the enclosed cemetery cloister, the Camposanto.  (The name means “sacred field”, because during the Third Crusade, Ubaldo Lanfranchi, Archbishop of Pisa, brought back a boatload of earth from Calvary, where Christ was crucified, and covered the church graveyard with it.  Or so goes the legend.)

There are about eighty ancient sarcophagi in the Camposanto.  Beatrice had been Marchioness of Tuscany, and her sarcophagus is splendidly decorated with 2nd century reliefs by an anonymous Roman master, which tell, in part, the tragic myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus: 

Phaedra was married to Theseus, but she lusted after Hippolytus, Theseus’ son by another woman.  When the horrified Hippolytus rejected his stepmother’s advances, Phaedra vengefully lied to Theseus, accusing Hippolytus of raping her.  Theseus, enraged, persuaded his father Poseidon to punish Hippolytus, and the god sent a sea-monster to startle the young man’s horse, which dragged him, tangled in the reins, to his death.  Phaedra, overwhelmed by guilt, killed herself.

All the buildings in the “Field of Miracles” are superb examples of Romanesque architecture, even though the tower tilts precariously; and the whole ensemble, gleaming in white marble against the green lawn of the piazza, is breathtaking.  In the Cathedral and the Baptistery there are breathtaking works of art, too, but few are left in the Camposanto except the marble sarcophagi. Once there were brilliantly frescoed walls, including, appropriately for a graveyard, a great cycle of paintings called “The Triumph of Death”, by Buffalmacco, a Florentine artist immortalized in the Decameron of Boccaccio.  The frescoes were badly damaged in July 1944, when a bomb fragment from an Allied raid ignited the wooden beams supporting the roof.  Molten lead from the roof ran down the walls, badly damaging the paintings. They are still there, but their colours are dimmed forever.  So let us leave the Camposanto, just for a little, to visit something that, with help from Beatrice’s sarcophagus, set European art on a new path.

The round Baptistery of Pisa is very large, as church baptisteries go, and slightly taller than the Leaning Tower.  Few tourists in the Campo venture inside, so voices echo strangely in the vast empty space.  Sometimes, for the amusement of visitors, the guard loudly sings a series of notes, and the whole building fills with echoed tones, bending time as they eerily harmonize together.

Just to the left of the font is a hexagonal pulpit, supported by a central column and six corner columns of coloured marble, all from Ostia, the ancient port of Rome.  Above the column capitals are sculpted figures of Christian virtues, one of which is Fortitude, in the form of a nude, muscular man holding a lion skin.  He is Hercules, of course: an ancient classical god oddly embodying a Christian virtue.

There are five marble panels forming the walls of the pulpit, bearing high-relief sculptures of the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment.  

The pulpit was made by Nicola Pisano, in 1260, nearly two centuries after Beatrice was entombed in the cemetery, and eleven centuries after the sarcophagus was made.  The panels of the pulpit are carved naturalistically – a startling departure from the stiff and stylized Gothic manner of the time.  Such lifelike, individualized figures had rarely been seen since the Western Roman Empire collapsed.  Garments drape believable bodies in convincing folds; the child, in the Adoration scene, shows innocent delight in the gifts he receives.

Nicola, working in the Baptistery, created his pulpit just a few hundred feet from the Camposanto.  No doubt he studied the ancient sarcophagi there. He didn’t make slavish copies, of course.  But it is surely no accident that the figure of Mary in the Adoration scene, seated holding the Christ child, mirrors in reverse the posture of Phaedra on the sarcophagus.  Or that the handling of draped fabric, in all the panels, is adapted from the sarcophagus.  Or that Hercules stands with his weight shifted to his right leg, just as the nude figure of Hippolytus, standing horrified before Phaedra, shifts his weight onto his left, in a posture called contrapposto, very rare in Gothic sculpture.

Nicola Pisano re-introduced classical naturalism back into Medieval Christian art.  His son, Giovanni, combined Gothic and classical in another pulpit, in the Cathedral.  Nicola’s apprentice, Arnolfo di Cambio, followed his master’s lead, but it took a century-and-a-half before Ghiberti and Donatello and Brunelleschi, in Florence, finally made naturalism dominant in Italian sculpture. 

How and when did the artistic Renaissance in Italy begin?  Was it with Giotto in 1305, with his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, as many people would argue?  Or was it with Nicola’s pulpit in the Pisa Baptistery in 1260, inspired by the Pagan myth of Phaedra, carved on an ancient tomb?

Text © 2020 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2020 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, April 2020